In Between
by CoriOreo
Summary: One year of marriage has been a happy time for the younger Van Dorts, but Victoria has fallen ill and is beginning to die. Now Victor must return to the Land of the Dead to find a way to save his wife and unborn child. Follows 'The Wine of Ages'.
1. One Year

1

Victor had still dreams, sometimes, about moments in his past that had never really happened, where he stood in the center of a moonlit parlor while a smiling brown-haired girl beckoned him toward the grand piano to tell him her name and other secrets.

It had been a year.

The first two weeks bore a wedding on their wintry tide. Between November's small flurries, and in the days following the walking dead having returned to their graves in an event that few citizens deigned to talk about, the esteemed Lord and Lady Everglot had found themselves burdened by a widowed daughter and less money in the aftermath of her marriage ceremony than they'd had before. There were, of course, customs to take into consideration – a year of mourning yawning before the young bride, investigation into the matter of her inheritance, and the proper burial of her departed's mysteriously-absent remains being foremost on everyone's minds – but it was a matter of equal concern that the season for the collection of the Queen's taxes was fast upon them, and that coin had been regrettably tight for the last decade or so. Miraculously, the groom's most gracious parents objected not in the least to making their son a second husband following a quick annulment. For the second time in one month, Victoria Bittern, née Everglot, and Victor Van Dort found themselves betrothed. They didn't mind as much as they might have.

So under the scowling eyes of Pastor Galswells, man and wife were wed on a November afternoon in the parlor of the Van Dort's townhouse. Debarred from the church and from Everglot Manor, both so recently tainted by the presence of the unblessed dead, the ceremony was cramped and smelled faintly of the mothballs beneath the rug. The windows were high, though, and south-facing, and the clear white autumn skies without blanched the room so that bride and bridegroom alike appeared to glow where the light touched them. "With this ring," he said, "I ask you to be mine." The words were not difficult. As the golden ring slipped over his new wife's small finger, Victor would have wondered at what kind of fool he must have been to be unable to master his lines a month earlier, but he was instead distracted with pulling Victoria close and kissing her at the altar in sight of God and men. Maudeline gasped and Finis snorted and William made a sound, something like "Hrrm!" but Victoria's lips were too sweet for them to sour.

_Let them cluck,_ Victor thought brazenly as his wife pulled away and grasped his arms, her smile prim but her eyes full of joy. _Let them be shocked._

_Life is much too short._

Their second month together was spent at her family's private country estate, standing far from prying eyes but still full to the brim with the sorts of whispers and small laughs that only newlyweds seem to know. Whether relaxed before the fire or standing together at the open window, Victor and Victoria felt always warm in one another's presence as December wrapped its soft snowy cloak around their shoulders. A townhouse of their own came soon after returning to the village, one at first dim and scantly-furnished, but able over time to trap all of their light within its walls. A chaise lounge and a piano fitted the drawing room, and two bedrooms were prepared for appearances' sake, if only one was ever used. The new housekeeper never said a word of it, and for this Victor was thankful. Nothing had prepared him for the quiet delight of waking in the dark of the day's first hours and being able to hold another body close to his own.

In the fifth month, Victoria entered a kitchen for the eighth time in her life, prepared to make dinner in celebration of her husband's birthday. The meal afterward could not be salvaged, but there was enough canned fish in the pantry to last a year and a fine pastry cake in the ice box, so they didn't go hungry. Victoria seemed so apologetic afterward that Victor felt compelled to ensure her that he'd had birthdays far worse; she made it up to him by finally taking him by the hand that night and telling him that they were going to have a baby.

Oh. Well, of _course_ they were.

Even April's dreary sleet hadn't been enough to push him back down to earth after that. Still, that night he found himself dreaming of sitting on a piano bench and telling the news to the girl in the dark with him. If she'd said anything back, he couldn't remember, but he did recall that she'd smiled wider than he knew a person could. When he woke in the night afterward, Victoria smelled like powder and crushed roses on the pillow next to his. He fell asleep again with his arm around her waist and a warm feeling in his chest.

Spring was cold that year and summer short as ever. Three rose bushes bloomed in the garden with a handful of wildflowers, but little else could be convinced to grow in the rocky soil, so when the rare sun spilled through the kitchen window during breakfast, it was always a rose in white or red or yellow that stood on the sill to catch the rays. There were butterflies to be found and sketched in the garden, and fresh fruit at the grocer; when Victoria caught a cough in August, Victor brought her apples and blackberries, and a published volume of Shakespeare's plays to read to the baby. It was only halfway through the first act of _Titus Andronicus_ that he found his enthusiasm for the early exposure of his child to classic literature ebbing, however, and he eventually closed the book and slipped it onto the shelf while Victoria napped in the afternoon sun. Lesson learned, then.

With October approached the anniversary of both of their first marriages and of his untimely death, the latter an odd occasion for oneself to be able to acknowledge, but a valid one nonetheless. The day on which the dead had risen from the earth came and passed; the greengrocer's son was heard once in the back of the store to ask whether his grandfather would be visiting again, but was quickly hushed. That night Victoria approached her husband in the study to ask a question about why moths are so fatally attracted to open flame, and they ended up with their arms wrapped tight around one another, sitting together on the small desk chair. She didn't cry, but kept her head buried close to his neck, and Victor himself struggled to contain a biting, empty sorrow. They talked; communication was rarely a problem between the two of them, but on that night many things seemed to go unsaid.

_Dying,_ she'd asked him for the first time that night. What was it like? Victor thought, and when he spoke, it was to tell her: It was like standing in the center of a grand parlor, prepared to walk out the door to the gardens, and then being pulled back out through the wall. Bugger if that made any sense, but it was as close to true as he could say. He'd kept the suit he died in and still took it out every once in a while for examination. Three neat slashes cleaved the grey wool jacket stored in the bedroom where he never slept. No matter how many times he looked, not a drop of blood was to be found in the weave.

The girl at the piano never seemed to have anything to say about that.

Now Victoria was as heavy as the harvest before the first frost, and Victor had never been so in love. When the weather was decent they sat together in the scrub garden or strolled at the edge of the woods; when it was not, they read together, and Victor taught her of sketching and piano playing. Every note and line she learned, he hoped, was to become as much a part of their child as of either one of them alone.

In the rushes of late October, a third bedroom was prepared.

One year.

Everything was going much better than could have been planned.

* * *

**It's my birthday, guys! And as a present to myself, I'm finally posting the first revised chapter of this story. With plots becoming rapidly more entwined in my head, this fic is going to be completed in its entirety before I post the next chapter of _All Hallow's Eve. S_orry about that. It's gonna take a while, but I hope it'll be worth it. **

**Remember that this monster**** follows directly from the ending of _The Wine of Ages,_ and makes little to no sense otherwise.**

**Enjoy, and please let me know what you think of it.**


	2. A Periodic Roughness of the Throat

**My apologies for the slow update. This school term has not been kind to me, and free time has been hard to come by.**

**Dialogue edited on November 17, 2012 at Flaming Trails', and others', recommendations.**

2

The in-laws would be arriving in minutes, and Victoria, distressingly, still had yet to finish dressing. While the housekeeper, Mrs. Hall, helped the young woman into a maternity corset and wrapper in preparation for the meal, the gentle buzz of their conversation through the powder room door was regularly interrupted by bouts of rough coughing. Every time they sounded, Victor would leap nearly out of his chair in the hallway outside and stand for several minutes at a time, usually picking at his cravat without remembering that it was supposed to stay as flat as possible before their parents' arrival. The autumn resurgence of Victoria's summer illness could not have been more poorly timed; the cough had returned in her seventh month, followed by chills in the nighttime and a drawn look about her face. She insisted that she'd battled a periodic roughness of the throat since she was young, and still kept up in many of her daily activities, but had Victor been a more overbearing man he would have forbidden her from those undertakings in favor of bed rest and throat syrup.

When finally she emerged from the powder room with minutes to spare, in a light burgundy button-down dress with a fine cut which nearly concealed her burgeoning form, Victor tried to stop to compliment her, but was instead rushed from the upstairs landing by an irate housekeeper who, with dinner guests nearly upon them, had just spent twenty minutes away from the stove. Victor gently helped his wife down the stairs before the two of them arranged themselves neatly in the entrance hall, side-by-side at the foot of the stairs as they waited. He glanced down at her; she met his gaze and smiled. Victor took a deep breath.

"Are you ready?" he asked in a low voice.

"I suppose I am," she said. "The day I learn to stand up to your mother when she has_ plans_ is the day I never suffer again."

The evening's get-together had been arranged almost entirely at Nell Van Dort's behest, despite the utter lack of enthusiasm exhibited by all other concerned parties. Victor did not consider himself a skilled host, but the meal apparently _must_ take place at the younger Van Dorts' home so that they might have the honor of making their beloved families feel welcome. Why the Everglots had agreed to attend as well was beyond Victor's understanding, but their presence was sure to not make dinner any more pleasant.

"At eight o' clock you could decide to feel tired and we'll cut the evening short," he suggested.

"Manipulative, but non-confrontational," Victoria murmured. "I have wed an absolute rogue." She lifted the back of a hand to her lips and coughed; her demeanor was delicate, but she visibly struggled to prevent the rough _hem_ from developing into a fit. She pressed three fingers against her lips, swallowed, and then laid her hands gently against her skirts once more while Victor looked on with concern. He reached out to squeeze her hand while glancing to the door.

"Are you _quite_ certain you're strong enough for this?" he asked, not for the first time.

"For goodness' sake, Victor," said his wife, "I've told you I'm predisposed to coughing. I'm quite fine, really."

"It's not getting worse because – b-because of -" _'The baby?'_ he was about to ask before he was interrupted by a pompous _BANG! BANG! _at the door. His parents had arrived at 6:30 so precisely that, had he not known that his mother wasn't patient enough for the exercise, he would have suspected that they'd spent full minutes standing on the stoop with a pocket watch.

Nell's first words upon entering the house were, "Oh, Victor, what on _earth_ are you doing answering your own door?" while William limped blithely across the threshold and deposited his hat on the rack without making eye contact.

"The housekeeper is making our meal, Mother," Victor said as, in the corner of his eye, he could see Victoria already struggling to maintain her composure. "Haven't we spoken about this before?"

"Seems you ought to hire a second housekeeper, then, doesn't it?" Nell asked cheerfully as she bustled toward the parlor. "Have the Everglots arrived?"

"Not – not yet," Victor said, stumbling as his mother shoved her handbag into his arms. As she left for the warmth of the drawing room fire, he made to place the bag on the floor, but realized that this was like to give her a fit, and was pondering over where to set it in the sparse entrance hall when Victoria slipped quietly next to him and took it from his hands.

"I'll find a place for this," she said primly, inclining her head toward the parlor door. "You ought to see to your family."

"They're _our_ family now," he said despondently as Victoria disappeared into the far hall, but she didn't turn back and he suspected that he might not see her again for as long as she could reasonably keep away. He stood tall, straightened his jacket, and entered the parlor with a modest smile fixed on his face.

Victor's mother was looking an amusing shade of tan; two months spent in a baroness's castle on the coast would do such things. "So unfortunate you couldn't come," she said of it as the young man seated himself on the lounge before the smoldering fireplace. "Grand view of the ocean, and the most wonderful tea I've ever drunk, wasn't it now, William?"

"Grand indeed," William droned from his comfortable sitting place by the dark window. "Came from India, now, dinnit, Dear? Yes, wonderful." Nell tittered and Victor reflected that most all tea was from India, while William continued on, affixing his son with an uncharacteristically steely gaze: "Now tell me, Victor, do you think much of Indian _fish?"_

"I -" _BANG! BANG! _"Ah!" Victor was spared having to answer by way of the Everglots' arrival. "Excuse me, Father, there are – ah – the other guests…" He hurried from the room.

Victoria, to his surprise, arrived in the entrance hall at the same moment that he did, descending the stairs with a more drawn look about her face than usual. He offered her a smile before sweeping the door open with a small bow. "Lord and Lady," he bade them. "Welcome."

The Everglots, standing unmoving on the doorstep, did not seem impressed by this display. They glanced at one another, rolled their eyes simultaneously, and Finis waddled across the threshold with his hands upon his lapels, chin held so high that it almost reached Victor's waist. Maudeline took slightly longer to accept her invitation into the house. Her eyes locked on her daughter's from the doorstep before she deigned to take an imperious step inward, her hair catching slightly on the doorframe.

"Victoria," she said stiffly as she pulled free with a small bobble. She glanced quickly downward before turning away. "You're looking quite bloated."

Victoria's mouth thinned. "Thank you mother," she managed. "And you seem rather – lean." Maudeline didn't respond. Victor could see his wife briefly close her eyes before taking a deep breath and pasting a pleasant smile across her face. "I'm sure we're going to have a lovely evening together," she said brightly.

"Of course we're not," Finis said, already impatiently checking his pocket watch as Nell's voice blasted suddenly from the drawing room doorway.

"Lady Everglot!" Victor's mother stood silhouetted by the firelight, positively jiggling with excitement. "Oh, you look _ravishing_ this evening!"

"I wish I could say the same," Maudeline said without even the pretense of a smile.

"Mother," said Victoria in a low voice.

"Mother," Victor said in kind, laying a calming hand on Nell, who looked prepared to sweep forward and envelop the Lady Everglot in a bosomy hug, which he suspected might be the last thing she'd ever do.

"Maudeline," Finis sniffed, glancing upward at his wife.

"Finis," she said in a warning tone.

"Finis!" called William as he hobbled up next to Nell.

"William!" said she.

And just as Victoria looked as though she might flee the entrance hall altogether, the housekeeper stepped calmly from the dining room and called above the cacophony: "Dinner is served." Victor could not have been happier to have a reason to usher his guests out of that hall. What to do with them once they were seated at dinner, however, he hadn't the foggiest idea about.

As it turned out, he needn't have worried; his mother was present, after all, and there was no need for a charismatic host at the head of the table when Nell possessed the unique ability to hold a four-way conversation with herself on any subject that crossed her mind, stopping only occasionally to nudge her husband wherever she required affirmation. While the Everglots and the younger Van Dorts picked quietly at their roast duck and potatoes, Nell happily informed her captive audience of their stay with the baroness, who apparently possessed a fascinating collection of exotic gallstones. Victoria's wrapping was presently criticized for its lack of emphasis on her waistline, and Victor was called out twice for slumping in his chair while he found himself growing more mentally withdrawn from the visit with every passing minute. The dinner conversation was not really so much a conversation as a monologue, and as always, Nell stood at center stage.

They supped for nearly an hour, and between the second course and dessert he managed to catch Victoria's eye. She turned to him and he knew instantly what she would have said had they been alone: "I am about to go mad."

_As am I,_ he thought to himself as the clock chimed seven-thirty. _Half an hour more._

As dessert was served, a moist white cake which earned the Van Dorts' housekeeper her first compliment from Nell for its excellent taste ("Thank you," Mrs. Hall had said, "I bought it in town,"), the inevitable subject was broached – by Lord Everglot, of all people. He completed the last bite of his dessert cake and pushed the plate away, adjusting his wide mouth and hanging his hands comfortably again from his lapel. "So, Vincent," he called out over Nell's talk on the fascinating properties of antique bookends, "what will you be naming your progeny?"

The table quieted immediately. For the first time all evening, Nell seemed interested in hearing someone else speak. Victor had not expected such a sudden shift in focus and choked slightly on his cake, but Victoria patted him on the arm and spoke in his stead.

"We… haven't decided," she began carefully. Lord Everglot snorted and his wife raised a critical eyebrow.

"You'll be doing him a favor by giving him a strong man's name," Finis said. "_'Ajax.'_"

"Gesundheit," said Victor.

"Mm, quite right. What about 'William'?" suggested William.

Victoria spoke up again. "Well, actually," she said laying a protective hand above her midsection, "I have, um, that is… Of course, there is always the likelihood that I am mistaken. But I…" she shot Victor a shy glance, "…I think the baby will be a girl." Finis snorted again.

"Females," he said, flipping his pocket watch open. "Always confusing emotion for insight." Nell, though, seemed delighted.

"Oh, that's _wonderful,"_ she gushed, leaning across the table to pat Victoria's arm, her bodice jiggling dangerously close to the cake. "I've always wanted to name a girl, haven't I, William?"

"Mm, oh, yes dear," William said, nodding. "Why, you were almost called Winnifred anyway, Victor."

"Any daughter of an Everglot deserves a good moral name to guide her in life," sniffed Maudeline. "'Prudence.' Or 'Chastity,' perhaps."

Lord Everglot scoffed, standing upon his chair. "Pah! The daughter of an Everglot deserves the name of an Everglot. Victoria," he said, checking his clock once again, "you have fifteen recent female ancestors to choose from, though you might dig deeper if you so choose. I personally recommend your great-aunts Henrietta or Vertiline, their Grandmother Theodosa, my cousin Philomena, or Aunt Jessamine's second-cousin's first wife, Elvira. Fine Everglot women, all."

"What about 'Helene'?" Nell mused from behind a second slice of cake.

Amidst the discord, Victor stood and finally found his voice. "We, ah -" he said over the noise, twisting his cravat and swallowing nervously, "that is to say, we haven't _decided_ as of yet, but -" He glanced desperately at Victoria, who gave him a wan smile and then frowned, turning to cough raggedly into her napkin. He thought he saw her pause as she pulled it from her mouth, but his attention had already returned to the guests. "W-we haven't decided on a name, but we'd thought that our personal favorite for a girl was – was 'Emily.'" He smiled at his wife and she straightened her back with a smile of her own, though she suddenly seemed somewhat paler than normal.

For a moment, no one spoke. The Everglots shared a glance; however much they apparently disliked one another, they did share an awful lot of glances. It was William who finally broke the silence.

"Rather – rather common name, don't you think, Victor?" he asked, scratching his head mildly.

"Indeed," Maudeline said. "I was aware of a cobbler's wife named Amelia once. That's quite close enough."

Victor was put out. "Well, we liked it."

"Well, you're a new father and prone to make mistakes, Victor," Nell assured him.

And for a moment again, there was silence.

"What is your preferred name if it's a boy, Victor?" William asked finally. "'William,' perhaps?"

"_'Leonidas,'_" said Finis imperiously, and from the entrance hall the clock struck eight. Victoria immediately stood up. She smoothed her skirts, adjusted her sleeves, and offered both sets of parents a beaming smile.

"I," she began, "am very tired." She turned her head to her husband, inclined it slightly, and turned back. "Please, I think I – I must retire for the evening. I hope you had a wonderful time and that we might have another dinner at some date after the baby is born." She froze for a second with her eyes unfocused on the far wall, and then she swept abruptly from the room.

Victor was taken aback. It was not like Victoria to be so short, but there was nothing he could have done for her ending the evening even if he'd wanted to; upon realizing that they were being released, the Everglots left the dining room nearly on their daughter's heels. Victoria was nowhere to be seen in the entrance hall, so her parents offered their cold thanks to Victor for having had them for dinner. Nell was loath to leave her captive audience, but was eventually ushered to the door with many unprecedentedly tearful hugs imparted upon her son, several attempted on Maudeline Everglot, and one successfully landed on Finis, who was lifted from the ground entirely for its duration.

"Your housekeeper simply must tell us where she bought those cakes," William said cheerfully as he fetched his hat from the rack and winked at his son. Victor was about to thank him for coming when he added, "And you still might want to reconsider that choice of name, Victor. Lacks distinction, donchaknow. Find yourself a decent son's name as well. You never know how these things might go."

"_'Musket,'_" Finis suggested as he straightened his dinner jacket for a final time. Maudeline waited for Victor to open the door for them, and then the couple left with only the slight _shfft_ of Maudeline's hair wisping against the doorframe to see them out.

"Now, you be good to yourself, Victor," Nell said, licking a finger and smoothing back his hair as the Everglots disappeared into the night. "We're leaving for the lakeside in two days' time, so have a strong grandchild waiting for us when we return, you hear?"

"Yes, Mother," he said obediently. She would have started talking about her experience with infant care then as well, but William was bold enough to take her by the elbow and lead her from the house himself. _"And no honey!" _was the last thing Victor heard from her before he managed to finally slip the door closed and quickly fix the deadbolt in place. The clang of the heavy iron lock echoed in the suddenly-empty hall, and Victor had rarely heard so sweet a sound. He pressed his back against the door and sighed.

Mrs. Hall was exiting the dining room with dishes in her hands when he looked up. She was a rather severe older woman who had been a widow for more than a decade, and Victor was certain that she did not enjoy dinner parties any more than he or Victoria did. "I rather hope that this doesn't become a regular event," he said, smiling thinly as he stood, but Mrs. Hall did not return the grin.

"Was this yours, sir?" she asked, holding out before her a large piece of cloth. It took Victor a moment to realize that it was a folded dinner napkin.

"I don't believe…" he said, reaching for the cloth, but the moment he took it in his hands, the words died on his lips. It had not been obvious when the housekeeper held it, but the open fold of the crisp white napkin was spattered with drops of deep red. He blinked.

"Whose…?" he asked aloud, but his gaze was already drifting toward Victoria's powder room on the upstairs floor. He remembered her scared look at the table, and a sudden shock ran through him. He didn't remember dropping the napkin, but he was halfway up the stairs before his mind had even caught up with him.

He almost skidded on the upstairs rug, such was his hurry. "Victoria," he called, stumbling forward and knocking rapidly on the powder room door, "V-Victoria, are you in there?"

There was no response. _Oh Lord, maybe she's dead,_ he thought wildly as he rattled the door handle. To his surprise, it was not locked. "Victoria?" he said again, not wishing to intrude if she was underdressed. He was somewhat aware of Mrs. Hall coming up the stairs behind; she might have said something to him, but he wasn't entirely listening. Then, from inside the room, there sounded a muffled, jagged cough, and that was quite enough for him.

He pushed the door open and slipped inside as quickly as possible, to protect any privacy his wife might want. The powder room was almost dark, with only two candles burning on the walls, but it was enough for him to see that Victoria was still decent. She sat on a small chair along the far wall near the window, her head bowed, her arms resting upon her belly. It was difficult to tell in the flickering candlelight, but she seemed to be shaking.

"Victoria?" he asked, dread surfacing in his stomach like ice. "Victoria, are you alright?"

She glanced up with a trembling lip, her face lit with the candles' dull yellow glow. "Oh, Victor," she gasped finally, her voice full of tears. He crossed the room in three strides and knelt at her side, taking her hands in his own. "Victor, I'm s-so sorry. I didn't know."

"What?" he asked, truly confused. "You've done nothing wrong." Victoria only shook her head.

"I'm sorry, Victor," she repeated. He gently rubbed his thumbs along her palms and was suddenly aware of a thick slickness along them. She pulled her hands from his and laid them facing upward in her lap, where the dim flickering light lit them with an impersonal warmth. He looked away. Along the wall of the powder room sat Victoria's vanity, a white-wood antique which was likely their most valuable belonging. The mirror glinted with candlelight and the bright polished wood was yellow in the dark room.

Victoria seemed ready to cry. "I-I think it might be time to call the doctor." He nodded dumbly. The vanity seemed to glow in the darkness. Candlelight might turn everything gold, but Victor felt a gray sickness eating at his heart, and the heavy drops of blood sprinkled across Victoria's fingers were still as black as pitch.


	3. Moths and Clocks and Bell Jars

3

Victor was having that dream again.

The dark parlor in which he stood was longer than he could see end-to-end and its ceiling was lost to misty distance, but the vast, veined marble floor that spread endlessly around shone with liquid moonlight. Long-paneled windows, far taller than many trees, rose majestically along the wall before him, framing the vague and far-off gray shapes of pines and grass behind a cloying, settling gloom; the moon in the sky was cloaked in a cloud-rippled corona as it gently tipped light from a bottomless pail to spill across the polished black floors, bright as sunlight's blue twin. All that was not lit was black beyond seeing, but he had been here far too often before to question where to go. He could see her even now, seated away from him at the piano in the center of the moon's puddled light, almost swimming between the heavy motes of dust that drifted in the air like snow.

_("Mister Van Dort?")_

"Emptily," Victor called to her, but upon saying the word he knew that it hadn't been right at all. In the next moment, he was at her side, brushing his hands along the ivory keys of the beautiful old piano while she bowed her head toward her lap. She was dressed in some mild hue, indefinite beneath the heavy color of the moon, but her hair was brown – that much he knew. "I'm so sorry," he said to her, stepping backward to give her space. "I can't remember your name."

_"Mister Van Dort…?"_

Wind sighed against the unseen rafters far above. "Do you want me to leave?" he asked.

_ "Mister Van Dort!"_

And then he woke up.

Victor jerked himself upright on the wooden bench. His eyes were pained instantly by the dull lampglow in the short upstairs hallway, and his neck was afire as he sat upright to address Doctor MacGregor, a squat man with a fussy moustache who so resembled Victor's father-in-law that he would have imagined them related if he hadn't known that no Everglot would ever deign to marry a Scot. "I'm so sorry," he mumbled. He hadn't meant to fall asleep, but rest had been hard to come by for the last two days. He knew he'd been dreaming of something beautiful, but already he couldn't remember what.

Doctor MacGregor, though, he realized, had been speaking since he woke, and only now was Victor beginning to catch up with him. "…well-along. You'll want to keep her abed, rather – _hrrm_ – and well-rested, of course. Unfortunate we cannot begin treatment quite yet. What is the, _hrrm,_ presumed date of delivery, sir?"

Victor looked up. "I'm sorry, I – w-what?"

"The child," the little man said, rocking backward on his heels. "You do know when the infant is due to be born, Mister Van Dort?"

Victor would have thought it the doctor's place to know such things, but he had no energy for debate. "Um," he mumbled, rolling his thin shoulders and slumping forward on the bench. "The latter half of November by – by V-Victoria's estimate…"

"Rather good, rather good," harrumphed the doctor as he took down small notes in the small paper pad he never seemed to look up from. "Now, I must ask this serious question," – he raised a prodigiously fluffy eyebrow at the young man – "is it possible you yourself may have been – _hrrm_ – infected, sir?"

Victor sat up on the bench slowly. "Infected with what?" he asked, though he already knew the answer.

Doctor MacGregor sniffed, clearly unimpressed. "The consumption, as I said." He kept saying something after that as well, but whatever it was, it was quite lost on Victor, because abruptly, the entire world had come to a complete stop.

Victor Van Dort was not a rash man. He might have become angry, or tried to argue the small doctor, or perhaps stood without thought and rushed to Victoria's bedside to clasp her hand. He didn't, though. He stayed sitting on the bench in the dark-lit hallway while Doctor MacGregor talked about lungs and laudanum and labor, though the latter was submitted with much delicacy and many euphemistic references to "the process." Victor found himself nodding weakly at every suggestion. When the doctor spoke of sanitariums he murmured quiet assent, and when the benefits of fresh air were broached, Victor promised to keep the bedroom window open without thought for how cold the late days of October were. Quite suddenly, he was standing with Doctor MacGregor at the front door and receiving a highly-specialized prescription for "soup and bedrest," to which he smiled graciously, shook the good doctor's fat hand, and bid him good night.

And then, with a slam and a spin, the door was closed, and Victor stood in the center of the hall with his eyes on the wooden floor and nothing on his mind but a heavy woolen blanket of unspeakable despair. Sensation cycled between his stomach and his hands and his feet and up to his eyes and back down to his stomach, thrilling and twisting wherever it moved. He thought he might be ill.

The grandmother clock on the mantel struck eight and Victor looked up.

Mrs. Hall was standing at the top of the stairs with a deeper frown than usual and her hands clasped in front of her apron. Hers was a disapproving face, but he thought that there was sorrow beneath the heavy lines around her mouth.

"Did you hear?" he asked, taking a small step toward the base of the stairs.

The older woman sighed. "I did, Mister Van Dort."

"I understand if you feel the need to leave. F-for your health, of course," Victor said, even as it stung slightly to do so. Mrs. Hall had come into his and Victoria's employment in their third month in the townhouse, hailing from out-of-town and so placing little stock in the rumors of corpses and weddings that had haunted the Van Dort family since that fateful night some months past. Though her demeanor had been too similar to Maudeline Everglot's for Victor to be immediately comfortable with her perpetual presence in his house, he had grown rather fond of the woman. She was grounded where Victor tended to be forgetful, kept quiet about any and all unorthodox or unbecoming goings-on in the house, and if nothing else she kept food on the table while neither of the young Van Dorts was entirely sure as to how to light a stove. However much they depended on her, it would be far from fair to ask her to remain in a sickhouse.

Even as these thoughts were running through the young man's mind, though, Agnes Hall was shaking her head. "No, Mister Van Dort," she said sternly, "I had consumption as a girl. I won't be catching any ill in this house." Running a palm along the graying hair tied in a tight knot behind her head, she began descending the stairs. "The further question, I believe, is whether _you_ are safe here."

"I'll be fine," he said dismissively, himself alighting the staircase. The two met in the middle of the stairwell, him heading up and she down. The candle on the entrance hall table lit their faces dully, like foxfire. "I don't know how to thank you for being willing to stay," he said.

The older woman was not one to take a compliment without resistance. "It's my job," she said bluntly, stepping downward past Victor without a backward glance. "If my father taught me nothing – and he _did_ teach me nothing, the bastard – but if he taught me one thing, it's that one never leaves one's work unfinished. I will not be leaving any sooner than you will." And with a small click she stepped out into the entrance hall and disappeared into the dining room. Despite his heavy cloak of sadness, Victor couldn't help smiling as she left.

When he stood alone on the stairwell again, though, the smile disappeared, and he peered up into the darkened hallway with as much dread in his heart as he had once felt staring down a chalice full of poison. The stairs creaked as he took one step, and then another; Victoria's bedroom was close to him, but it felt a thousand miles.

How could this happen?

_Crrrkk, errrrck, kkkrl._

In the upstairs hallway where that same flickering candle puddled in its sconce, Victor laid a hand on Victoria's bedroom door. He half wanted to stand outside and berate himself further for something which he held no responsibility for, or even walk away and leave his wife in peace for the night, but he turned the handle instead and stepped into the bedroom where he found a smoldering hearth and, against all his expectations, Victoria, propped up in the big canopied bed and reading a book.

She laid the tome in her lap as he entered. "I was wondering if you were going to come at all," she said, offering him a sweet smile.

"I thought you might be asleep," he admitted, closing the door behind and approaching her bedside. "The doctor is quite, ah, liberal with his laudanum, from what I've heard."

"I asked for no laudanum," Victoria said softly as her husband seated himself on the chair beside the bed. "For the baby," she added as he gave her a concerned look. "After she's born, certainly, Victor, I'll – I'll try anything they can think of." She reached out and took his hand, much larger than hers. "We only need to wait until November. I'm going to get better, I promise you." Her face was so pale and beautiful in the firelight, and her hair so long and soft, that Victor, for just an instant, thought he might be dreaming. Maybe it would have been better for Victoria if he were, but he was glad it was real; if he were to ever wake up one morning and find her a fantasy, nothing could have filled the hole left in his heart. He leaned forward to plant a kiss on her lips and she placed a hand on his shoulder in return.

They pulled away from one another with a small shared smile, but Victoria looked at him for only a moment before frowning and turning away. "You shouldn't be here," she murmured toward the fire. "You could … get sick."

_Dying the first time wasn't so bad,_ he almost said, but he held his tongue because he knew it wasn't true. It had actually hurt quite a lot. Rather, he gestured to the book in Victoria's lap and asked, "So, did you, ah, find something enjoyable to read?"

"Not at all," Victoria said with a small smile, closing the book to reveal the embossed cover reading _Ladies' Book of Etiquette_. "If I wanted to hear a woman lecture me in etiquette for hours at a time, I would invite my mother to visit," she said. "I'm not sure how it came to be on my nightstand, but after the doctor left it was the only thing I could reach." She ran her fingers lightly over the green cloth binding.

"We could put it in the fire, I suppose," Victor suggested quietly as he stared into the dying embers. Victoria let out a small snort of laughter that turned quickly into a cough. It was light at first, but within seconds became increasingly deep and rough. She turned away from him and shuddered into the handkerchief atop the nightstand, which Victor averted his eyes from, but not quickly enough to avoid seeing the small drops of red peppering its corners. Victoria took a moment, but presently the coughing died down, and she silently opened the small bureau drawer and slipped the cloth inside before sitting up and taking a deep, almost healthy-sounding breath.

"I don't know if we should burn it," she said conversationally, as if nothing at all had happened. "It might come of use someday, if our daughter…" Her jaw moved to finish her sentence, but the words never came out.

_If our daughter has no mother of her own to learn etiquette from,_ Victor thought. It was a heinous idea, so he said nothing in response, and for several moments they two simply sat next to one another in the dark room, staring at the fire in silence. The window was open just a crack, likely by the doctor's doing, and Victor felt a sharp prickling along the back of his neck. Whether or not that could be entirely attributed to the October chill, he wasn't sure.

Presently they began talking again. It was of little things at first, like moths and clocks and bell jars, but soon the conversation managed to break through tragedy's frosting shroud and turn into the sort of talk that Victor truly loved about his most perfectly-arranged marriage. Victoria was an educated woman, but all her life had been discouraged from any learning that could be construed as exploratory or enriching. Victor, conversely, was never discouraged to read – at least not expressly, since he'd spent most of his childhood alone in a bedroom with his mother and father paying not the least bit of attention to his goings-on. Left to his own resources, he had often visited libraries in his spare time and tried to find all possible information on all possible subjects, just to pass the hours. Only a few disciplines had held any lasting sway over him, lepidoptery being chief among them, but he still possessed a fair collection of facts from many areas of life. When Victoria found herself curious about how magnets work, or how a photograph is taken, he would tell her what he knew, and then make up the rest. On rare occasions at the beginning of their marriage they would open a bottle of wine and nearly choke to death on it, swapping theories in front of the fire, but these occasions had become less frequent since Victoria learned that drink might harm the baby.

Now, in that small bedroom beside the hearth, it was almost possible to forget the illness eating the life out from between them, and Victor had not felt so warm or happy in months. Before long he found himself perched on the edge of the bed, explaining to his wife that yawning was clearly a disease spread between people within range of vision, which could be deadly if it manifested itself while underwater. Victoria had never been prone to displays of excessive mirth, but still she covered her mouth and shook with laughter as he spoke.

The clock in the entrance hall struck nine o' clock, and then ten. The embers in the fireplace were burning low and cold as husband and wife found themselves whispering still, half-asleep in the darkness.

"Why," Victor muttered, laying across the foot of the bed, "does water drown a fire?"

He could hear Victoria's rustling from her nest of soft pillows and layered quilts. "Because," she murmured back, "fire, it… it never learned to swim."

Victor chuckled. "That's a good answer," he said, stifling a yawn.

"I never learned to swim," Victoria said, voice quieter than before.

"Neither did I," Victor said. His eyelids were heavy and the room was so dark that when he closed them it made his vision no different than before. He took a deep breath, a settling sound. From the head of the bed, Victoria was quiet.

He had almost fallen asleep when, nearly whispered, he heard, "Victor?"

"Yes?" he asked, opening his eyes.

"You should leave," Victoria murmured into the pillows. He sat up on his elbows. "Please, Victor. I don't want you to…"

He sighed. "I'm not afraid of getting sick," he said, slowly gaining his feet. "But I understand." He edged along the side of the bed to find Victoria, and of course ended up kicking the bedside chair straight into the wall with a wayward step. Victoria jumped in the darkness.

"Sorry," he whispered, putting out a hand to find her. It landed atop her belly, warm and firm even beneath all the bedquilts. For a moment he paused and heard only her breathing in the night; then he took a bow beneath the canopy and kissed her forehead. "Goodnight," he said, tiptoeing away. He managed to make it all the way to the door without incident.

For a year, he had shared Victoria's bright warm room each and every night. Now he found himself walking into the cold darkness of the master bedroom, a big and dreary room with a hard mattress and yawning hearth which hadn't seen fire in who-knew-how-long. The bedroom was fitted with a private water closet, but his night clothes were stored elsewhere. The only comfort to be found was the light of the waxing moon cresting past the cushioned windowsill on the far wall. The last several days had been cold and wet, but the sky this night was cloudless. He approached the window and laid against the sill with a deep sigh. Of course, Victoria was right in asking him to leave. If only he'd had somewhere to go.

The cold moon was blindingly bright above. Victor would have gazed at it for the rest of the night had bright lights not tended to make him so sleepy. Gently he closed his eyes as his mind drifted back to Victoria's room, imagining he was staying beside her in her illness, the way it seemed to him a husband ought to. _Falling ill myself,_ he tried to convince himself, _would solve nothing and possibly make everything much worse. _No rationalization seemed help, though. What was a husband who couldn't protect the woman he loved?

He hadn't been able to do it before, after all. When he'd tried to protect Victoria in the church, he'd only gotten himself killed instead.

It seemed to take him a long time to fall asleep, despite his tiredness. The swirling thoughts in his head slowed and quieted; the sill was not as comfortable as a bed, but it would do for tonight, and so Victor Van Dort fell asleep in a patch of moonlight.


	4. Just Ask the Dead

4

Victor Van Dort awoke in a patch of moonlight.

Or perhaps it wasn't really waking so much as a sudden return to awareness. One cannot wake into dreams that never seem to truly begin, after all. Without introduction, he found himself back beneath the window in the dark parlor; the endless ceiling creaked from far away, the marble floors beneath his shoes shone like glass, and the moon hung ever high in the sky outside, untouched by the swirling gloom that shrouded the earth and trees. However little he ever remembered about it after waking, this was always an old and familiar place to him while asleep.

The brown-haired girl at the piano was there again, and this time she was looking up at him with a wide smile and bright eyes. Victor found himself smiling as well. "Emily," he said, reaching out a hand.

"So you remembered my name this time," she said, laying a smooth fleshed hand on the piano keys. She looked more amused than annoyed, and her face was clear and pale and alive.

"Hm?" Victor asked, surprised. "Don't I normally?"

"Not always," she said, "but it's alright. Come on, sit down," she added, moving to make room for him on the wide bench. "We haven't talked in a while. How have things been going for you?"

"They're, ah," he said carefully, sitting down on the cushioned black bench, "not so well, I'm afraid." Ahead of him, he could have sworn that he'd seen something moving inside of the heavy mists, but no sooner had he looked than it had disappeared.

Emily looked concerned. "No?"

"No," he said. "My, ah..." He paused. "My parents chose to come calling two nights ago."

"Oh dear," she said, and he could hear her smiling. "How painful was it?"

"Very," he said, scooting away slightly on the bench in order to look at her. "The Everglots chose to come as well, and you know how well my parents and Victoria's get on together."

Emily laughed, but after a second admitted, "I don't really."

Victor shook his head. "I suppose you wouldn't, would you?" he asked. "You never met them. I'm sorry."

Emily shrugged. No matter how hard he looked, he never seemed to be able to see her quite as clearly as the rest of the parlor. "You could explain, I suppose," she said gently, laying a warm hand on his atop the keys, "but I can't help feeling like there's something else on your mind."

_Of course there is. There's always something worse._ "Nothing that should concern you," he murmured, brushing her hand away.

"Of _course _it should concern me, Victor," she said, sounding annoyed. "I'm as much you as you are."

He stared at her for a moment, unsure as to what she meant by that, but decided not to ask. He shook his head. "It's… It's Victoria," he said. "I'm afraid she's ill."

Emily placed her chin in her palm. Moonlight limned the curve of her shoulder and jaw and he could see her smiling at him, almost lazily, or perhaps with sadness. "Hmm. Yes, I've heard."

"Really?" Victor straightened his back and placed his hands on the piano keys. "I don't recall mentioning it."

"It was weeks ago, silly," she said, gesturing. "She has a cough. Do you have any idea how often we have this conversation?"

"Oh, no no no. Not a cough. I'm afraid you're behind the times." He pressed his finger against the piano, gently _tink_ing a high key. "It's…" He sighed and placed his hands back in his lap. "She has consumption. There's nothing to be done for it until after the baby's born."

"Oh." On his left, Emily lifted her head from her hands and cast a regretful look at the floor. "Oh, dear. That, I didn't know. I'm so sorry to hear that, Victor."

The moonbeams all around him were thick with dust. What looked like a small white feather fluttered past the corner of his eye between the shadows of the window-frames. "Yes," he said distantly. "So am I."

Then, for an amount of time that could have been mere moments or perhaps the whole night long, they didn't speak to one another. Victor found himself thinking back on great vaulted ceilings veiled in the darkness with which he was intimately familiar in the nighttime but could never remember in the day, and an imagined nursery swaddling only dust – and of Victoria, of her proclamation that fire drowns because it never learned to swim, and neither had she. In the fast, fractured cut of dreams, he suddenly found dread pooling in his stomach like mercury.

"What do I do?" he asked aloud.

Emily spoke. "Oh, Victor." When he looked at her, she was shaking her head and he thought he could see tears in her eyes. "If I only knew for sure."

He didn't precisely intend to move, but before he had taken account of himself he was standing up at the piano, trailing fingers along its glossy black veneer as he marched toward the window to stare at the fat full moon outside. "I'm frightened, but I don't know why," he heard himself say, as if suddenly acting out a part in a stage play. "I know what happens when you die, so why do I feel this way at the idea of it? I must be…" He clenched one hand into a fist. "Why am I so weak?"

And without moving at all, he knew then that Emily was suddenly at his elbow. He felt a very cold breath on his neck.

"Do you remember dying?" she whispered to him.

He grew still. _Yes._ Sometimes, in the dark of dreams, he could remember what he had seen while traveling in between two bright worlds. There were no words for it.

"I don't know," he lied.

"Then you don't remember the cold," she whispered, and he felt her very chill hand on his elbow. It hadn't been so cold a moment ago. "You don't remember the pain the body goes through while it struggles to keep itself alive and inevitably fails." He did, but said nothing. The walls of the parlor around him seemed curiously thin at the moment. "You don't remember walking across the nightlands with a child's fear of the dark in your heart, searching for harbor in the black. They're right beyond that window, Victor," she said, and he focused his eyes on the swirling gray mists outside beneath the moon, where he thought he'd seen something enormous moving. "We're in between right now, and you have never known fear until you find yourself lost in a truly infinite place with no guide."

"I don't remember," he said again, but wasn't sure if it had come out right. Everything seemed wrong; his dream was falling apart at the edges. Where the parlor had felt a warm place when he first arrived, it now was growing cold, and it seemed that the moonlight was no longer touching the floor, casting it into an absolute black that was funneling downward on itself. When he turned around, Emily's once-full face at his side was cast back into the cold blue of death, an eye gone, a hand skeletal, and everything about her so, so sad.

"Oh, no," he said, laying a hand on her face as the piano slid slowly toward the hole they stood in. "Did I do this to you?"

"It's alright," she said, even as her face became more of a skeleton beneath his very hands. "But please, you are not weak. Never underestimate why life fears Death, Victor, no matter how well it understands it."

And then, in a voice that seemed not to come from her but rather felt whispered clearly in his ear: _"Why, just ask the dead."_

Everything then became chaos. His feet lost purchase on the ground; there was a flash in his mind of the piano plummeting down toward him from the face of the moon, and of falling through a hole deeper than the earth. Then he heard a scream and a _thunk,_ pain exploded behind his forehead, his elbow hit the floor, and he opened his eyes to find himself on the wooden floor of the master bedroom, staring up at the windowsill on which an enormous raven sat, _quork_ing at him with its wings spread wide.

"What in -" he muttered, rubbing furiously at his forehead as he scrambled to his feet. One of his shoes kicked something along the ground and he could hear it rolling away; the raven screamed again and then hopped onto the windowframe, fluttering its wings at him before flapping away. Victor found himself standing in his empty bedroom, one hand on the cushioned, feather-covered sill and the other clasped to his sore forehead, mouth agape, wondering how the window had been opened since he'd fallen asleep. He shook his head. Already the dream he'd been having was falling away from his memory, but he remembered that Emily had been there.

_"Why, just ask the dead,"_ she'd said to him.

Slowly, he sat down upon the sill with his back to the window. The moon had risen significantly in the sky since he'd fallen asleep, but a splinter of light was still leaking below the frame's arch, and as he looked toward the edge of the bed, something was glinting there inside the moonbeam.

It looked like a cup.

He approached the large bed and then dropped to his knees. It was a cup – heavy pewter, with a downy black feather inside that flew away with a breath. He stood up slowly, walking back toward the window. The rim seemed to be stained with an ugly red rust, which on pewter was a strange sight to see. No, the whole thing was; it was plain, but somehow looked familiar. Had a raven just opened a window to drop a cup on his head?

_Just ask the dead,_ he thought, and felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.

Oh, no.

* * *

**Today, while I wrote _Corpse Bride_ as a dreamscape psychodrama wherein I exposed my own intimate fear of death, I realized that I might take my writing a little too seriously sometimes.**


	5. Charcoal Butterflies

5

Victoria was no great lover of dirt, but she was trying to learn.

When she took up gardening, her first challenge had been to decide which of her skirts ought to be sacrificed for the activity. The concept of a gardening dress had never occurred to her. She was halfway to the muddy spring yard in a lace-trimmed tea gown before Mrs. Hall had stopped her and asked why she was wearing an entertaining dress without shoes, and soon afterward brought her into town to buy something more practical.

All her life, Victoria Everglot had been heavily discouraged from unnecessary messing and mucking about, the better to mold her into the sort of young woman a wealthy man might someday choose to wed. _Well,_ she thought triumphantly, cutting into hard earth with the little metal trowel, _now I have managed to do both._ And bugger all who would look down on her for it. True, she still hadn't completely moved past her distaste for the sensation of caked, dried mud on her palms, or her revulsion toward scuttling beetles and worms, but the sight of her garden in summer bloom made it all worth it. Shifting slightly, more impeded by her belly, she pulled a bulb from the small pot at her side and called to her husband with a slight catch in her voice, "Have you found anything yet?"

And Victor replied, "I have."

The skies had been gray and dry for two whole days since Doctor MacGregor's calling, and Victoria had every intention of using this brief interlude in the dreary fall weather to catch as much fresh air as possible before winter came. Her throat was raw to the point where it sometimes hurt to swallow, and she suffered a persistent ache in her chest, but she was not yet willing to lie down and wither away. Victor and the doctor alike were wary of her overexerting herself grubbing about in the cold, but in truth she rarely felt more healthy than when kneeling in the loam. Wind rustled the garden scrub around her, all vegetation long dead beneath the autumn's suffocating gray, but even this late in the year there was deadheading to do, stems to pull, and bulbs to plant. Next year, the blooming daffodils would signal the coming spring sooner than any warm winds or bright sun. Victoria's hand slowed as she found herself wondering whether she would be there to see them.

Well, what tosh. She shook her head and asked again over her shoulder, "What sort of butterfly is it, Victor?"

She could hear him shifting slightly on the marble garden bench near the gate. "Come see."

Victoria stood up slowly and carefully. Pregnancy was not an easy time to spend on one's knees, and she was only as flexible as she still was for having remained relatively small. She pulled off her gloves and turned around to where Victor was watching her anxiously, looking about ready to stand from the bench and offer her help.

"I'm quite fine," she said preemptively, coughing lightly onto the back of her hand. It hurt much worse than she ever let on, but she wouldn't worry her husband unduly. Gingerly she stepped between the pots and tools scattered about the small gardening space behind the townhouse. The yard was framed by the back of the building on one side and a crumbling, ivied brick wall on the adjacent, but the view to the west and north were unobscured and bordered only by a thin wrought iron fence with a creaking gate which had kept Victoria awake and nervous more nights than she liked to admit. An accidental plot of thick wildflowers spilled out from between the fenceposts into the sparse meadow behind their home, from which the occasional small tree or shrub struggled to establish itself. Off to the west stood the great pine forest that Victoria had never been brave enough to enter, from childhood up to that very day. She found herself gazing at it as she settled next to Victor on the long cold bench, absently smoothing her skirts. Next spring she would bring her daughter into that forest and they would explore it for their first time together.

"_Pyronia…_ erm,_ tithonus,_" she heard Victor say at her side, and she peered across him to see what he was looking at. On the wrought spike atop the fence sat a small, plain butterfly in yellow and brown. She'd seen many like it in the garden before. "The Gatekeeper," her husband continued. The tall man was perched on the edge of the marble bench with a sketchpad in one hand and a charcoal vine in the other, a small smile on his face as he looked at the little thing. His artistry was a mystery to her; her endeavors to learning the piano had been fruitful for the past year, but she was coming to believe firmly that she had no head for drawing. Depth escaped her, and the feeling of charcoal on her fingers was even worse than that of dry mud. Victor's drawings were more than beautiful enough for the both of them.

"Why is it called that?" Victoria asked.

"Someone saw it on a gate once, I suppose," Victor said, sounding a little dubious. Victoria smiled and placed a hand on his shoulder, where his brown wool jacket was cold to the touch. The pad in his left hand was, curiously, open to a page of writing rather than sketching. She briefly read the line _"always present, quite sociable and friendly, without an ounce of bitterness to her demeanor"_ before Victor flipped forward to a half-completed picture of the butterfly on the fence, replete in soft lines and shadow. She could almost see the yellow of its wings between the black and white.

"Beautiful," she said, and he smiled and took her hand from his shoulder onto the bench between them.

"Oh! You're freezing," he said, wrapping her fingers tight. "Should we go indoors?"

Victoria said, "I'm not done planting."

"Well, let me help you," Victor said nobly, setting his paper aside and standing. "Then come inside and I'll make you a cup of tea."

Victoria rose in turn. "You don't know how to light the stove and can't make tea, dear."

"I'll have _Mrs. Hall_ make you a cup of tea," he corrected himself.

"Oh, come here," Victoria said, pulling Victor by the hand through the maze of dead planting boxes and pots toward the bed where she had been digging before. Settling on the ground and ignoring the pain in her chest as she pulled her gloves on, she took up her trowel again and gestured for her husband to do the same. Victor, though, was wearing his casuals, and found himself crouching awkwardly above the ground so as not to dirty his knees. "Take a hand-rake," Victoria said, "and -"

"Which one is that?"

"…The one that looks like a claw. Follow after as I bury the bulbs and rake soil over them, will you?"

"Of course," he said obediently. Then, as she pressed the first bulb underground: "What kind of bulbs are they?"

"Daffodils," she said, digging her trowel into the earth a second time to open up a new hole. "Plant them now and they'll bloom perennially in the spring." And there, again, was that discomforting thought of whether she would live to see them flower. As she fell into an easy pattern of burying the bulbs and moving on in the flowerbed, her mind wandered slowly into thoughts of laying in the bedroom two days past while the doctor had offered his diagnosis. The fire had been burning in the hearth and she was quite overwarm in bed, but the open window had only served to chill her exposed face. _"Consumption,"_ he'd said, and somehow hearing it said hadn't been as ghastly as she'd expected it to be. It had been the word on everyone's minds, after all, repeated so often between the lines that saying it aloud finally had seemed almost redundant. It had been days, but still, she couldn't quite be afraid. Perhaps part of her believed that it wasn't possible that she might actually die. Perhaps another part had simply lost its fear of death after the events she'd experienced a year past.

Though, if death was nothing to fear, why did poor Victor seem so frightened for her life?

But her thoughts were interrupted then by a deathly _"Gaah!"_from Victor. She gasped, jerking to the side as her husband suddenly stood, flailing desperately at something on his hand. Victoria scrambled to her feet as the offending particle went flying beyond the fence and she rushed to his side, eyes wide.

"What on earth happened?" she cried.

"A worm," he said, visibly shaking.

"A – a what?" Victoria coughed, dropping her arms and giving him a very flat look.

"It jumped at me," he insisted, holding his right hand far from his body, as if it were infested. She didn't like worms much either, but the way he was acting he might have been exposed to the plague. Victoria bit her lip as she fought the urge to laugh, swatting his arm down with her glove.

"Don't frighten me like that again," she said, swallowing a smile.

"Bring it up with the worm," he muttered, eyeing his own hand with distaste. Victoria bent her head and pressed her gloved hand against her mouth, shaking with mirth. She could feel it building up in her chest and throat, almost painful to repress – and finally she let go, giggling like a schoolgirl and then slowly lowering herself to the ground to laugh aloud, supported on her hands. It felt wonderful. She'd not let loose in such a way since – well, she couldn't remember, really. Her throat was tight but the mere act of laughing so freely was making her feel almost lightheaded. She could feel Victor's hand on her back and she waved him away.

"I-I'm fine," she choked, pressing a hand to her side. "I'm – oh, d-dear…" And then she broke again into gales of mirth. The more she laughed, the more she realized it wasn't really so funny, but her body was shaking in a way she couldn't stop. It was like stretching in the morning, a crucial relief, but her chest was beginning to ache as her laughter came out more bark-like, tasting of iron and salt, and when she tried to look up there were tears in her eyes. How odd. She was happy, not sad.

Had her joy not been so loud and harsh in her ears, she would have heard Victor telling her to straighten her back so she could breathe, but it was, so she didn't. Everything was going quite wibbly as she felt someone take her about the waist and lift her to a standing position. Her feet moved listlessly along the ground as she continued coughing, every movement a jolt in her chest. Oh, no, this wasn't enjoyable anymore. This hurt quite a lot.

She dazedly lifted her head to see Victor staring at her with his eyes wide and terrified. He was half-carrying her toward the house, and as her gaze drifted upward she could see the building's great dark shape silhouetted against the blank white sky. There was a blurry raven perched on the eaves. It fixed her with a beady eye and said to her, _"Quork,"_ but it sounded an awful lot like _"Talk!"_

"Oh, Victor," she murmured, her voice painful and tight. "I do love you." And she gently squeezed his hand as the shadow of their home fell across them, turning everything black as a bird's wing.

* * *

The candle was dying beneath the breath of the wind, and the pages on the desk rustled in sympathy. It was cold outside, but little colder than it had been during the day, and for autumn might have even been called quite temperate. Victor took a deep breath and lifted his pen again, struggling to fill out the words that now seemed so inconsequential. All day he had fought with his own thoughts; now he was striving to remember whether he had ever even truly had thoughts of his own.

The doctor had long come and gone, and no amount of protesting would have this time prevented him from leaving a heavy bottle of opium tincture at Victoria's bedside for cough suppression. Neither did she protest again; after fainting at the rear entrance threshold, she had been quite incapable of coherent argument even after waking. She'd sat up in bed after Mrs. Hall helped her upstairs, but only to apologize to Victor for falling on him. Then she fell quite asleep, and for that, he was grateful. It may have been the fastest path to recovery, and with the laudanum, she was somewhat less likely to choke in her sleep and die.

Somewhat.

Now the house was quiet and dark, even Mrs. Hall having retired to bed some time past. The waxing gibbous moon was high in the sky enough to light the study very thinly, and soon would move beyond even that poor help. The candle had perhaps an optimistic ten minutes of life left, and Victor's mind was as muddled as ever. He took a deep breath and looked down again at the writing that he had all morning been working to complete.

_Wednesday, October 30, 1878_

_I have never been much inclined to record my thoughts for posterity, but this seems as good a time as any to begin. Up until a year ago, nothing had occurred in my life truly worthy of note, but of late I have been woken often in the dead of night by the strangest of reoccurring dreams, and the longer I dream them, the clearer to me they become. _

_Most curious about it all is the pervading sense of familiarity to them. I can never remember a time in my life where I have visited the parlour in which these dreams take place, but each and every time the dream occurs, the impression that I am intimately familiar with it is inescapable. I realize of course that I have dreamed it many times, but that does not do justice to the eerie sense of ease I have there, or the insistent feeling I have that being there is allowing me to remember things that never follow me into wakefulness. It is rather like a long-forgotten place or favorite childhood toy. That is, I never had much to do with toys as a child, but I can assume. Oftentimes after waking I struggle to retain the memory, but the impression it leaves is distinct._

_And then, of course, she is always there. Whether within the dream's haze I remember her name or not, she is always present, quite sociable and friendly, without an ounce of bitterness to her demeanor. Our conversations are always reminiscent of returning to speak to an old friend. Well, I've never had many friends either, but I can imagine. Under the circumstances_

And there he had stopped. What had that morning seemed vitally important to understanding what he ought to do with the pewter wedding cup sitting on the master bedroom windowsill, he could now only see as a journal of silly dreams, the province of writers and mystics, of which he was neither. He'd tried, after finding the cup, to set it aside and take a few days to think rationally about what he might be meant to do with it, but it was becoming clear that Victoria was deeply ill, and he had no ideas. Fists clenched in frustration, he rose from the desk to stand before the window, gripping the sill. The wind lightly swept his hair and cut quite through the dress shirt sleeves beneath his vest. The candle flickered again.

Well, he had _one_ idea, but it was just as terrible as the potential consequences of not doing anything at all.

Slowly, he breathed deep. The chill night air sent shivers down his back, almost like a comforting pat. _It's alright, chap,_ he imagined it saying. _You know what you've got to do._

He did, at that. Oh, how badly he wished he'd not made her laugh that morning in the garden. It had been a _worm_. It oughtn't have provoked a reaction from him at all, but it was too late now.

So he turned back to his desk where the last bare inches of the candle struggled to stay alive and where the paper rustled false comforts. He took a deep breath as he dipped his pen and turned over a clean new sheet.

_October 29,_

_Dearest Victoria, I am so sorry as to what I have done by the time you read this. I never felt brave enough to tell you, but I have had dreams for these last many months which I believe are pointing me toward a way to bring you back to health. At my wedding (you know which one) there was involved a goblet of poison, and I believe it has come back into my possession. I am afraid I am heading back underground, my love, and I hope to be back soon. Today in the garden to see you so happy for a short while was a joy to me, and I would give anything to insure that your life is a long and healthy one. Please forgive anything stupid I attempt which may cause irreparable harm to myself, it was never my intention. My thoughts are only for you and our daughter. _

_Please refrain from reading anything humourous and STAY IN BED until I return._

_- Victor_

The candle hissed and sputtered out for a final time. Victor stowed his pen, capped the ink and arranged the papers in a neat pile atop the desk, lit by watery moonlight. His stomach was coiled tightly but his will was resolute. The worst that could happen was that he might die.

After a moment, the study door closed and there was the light sound of fading footsteps. The candle stub smoked gently in the darkness, whisked to and fro by the breeze. As the moon finally lifted above the window's view, the study was cast into a deep black. Even if one had been present in the room, it would have been difficult to see when the papers on the desk caught with the wind and fluttered to the floor, flipping and flying in dashes of black and white like charcoal butterflies.


	6. The Cup is Empty

**Happy new year, everybody!**

6

The cup was half-full.

Beneath the arcing beams of the high church ceiling, Victor Van Dort stood at the altar in much the same manner as he had a… well, a surprising number of times before. The grand marble-floored building seemed to have been waiting for him as he came, quietly welcoming with its promise of sanctuary. The last occasion on which he'd been allowed in this building had been nearly a year past, and in many ways it hadn't changed in the least – but he had no congregation now, no faces smiling or scowling and no flowers in the wings. There was only stained glass and silence and frankincense, and a wedding goblet in his hand half-full of water with a blush as red as blood.

It said, _I will be your wine._

The fire in Victoria's room had nearly been gone when he entered to say goodbye. He'd hoped that they might have been able to speak, but as he approached her bedside the bottle of opium on the nightstand had seemed to stare him down in defiance to the idea that he could wake her. She laid upon the nested pillows with her face and lips as soft and white as porcelain, dashed golden here and there with the touch of dying embers. The window, as ever, had been cracked open, and the room filled with the sweet smells of pinewood and water.

"I love you," he had told her as he laid a hand over her own atop the quilt. A lock of Victoria's brown hair had stirred with the hushed wind and her breathing was blessedly even and clear; he could imagine her a character in a fairy tale, a princess waiting to be woken by a prince. _Or a frog, if I'm involved._ Just in case she could hear, he promised her, "I'll be back soon," left a kiss on her warm forehead, and closed the window. No amount of fresh air could be helpful if it resulted in a morning chill.

So he'd left his home with the goblet in one hand and a jacket in the other, dressed in a waistcoat and sleeves and quite unsure as to what he really expected to happen that night. Every one of his assumptions was based on conjecture, of course. He knew there was poison in the cup, the red rust he'd seen lining its pewter mouth, but whether it was still potent he couldn't be sure without testing for himself. Whether it would pull him Downstairs as he wished, kill him outright, or merely make him ill was also part of his gamble, though he felt quite ill already. The waxing moon above his head had been neither cold nor warm, a facsimile of sunlight which cast the town square into a photo negative of day. The thin clouds were white and the sky was pitch black, and each step he took on the road out of town was one stride closer to the edge of the known. Briefly, he'd stopped at the well by the greengrocer's, where a stray scrawny cat was prowling on the search for a meal; when the bucket came forth from the well's bricked dark maw, he could hear its wood creaking and scraping, but no movement was summoned from within the shops on all sides. The whole world, it seemed, had been emptied of life.

The cup was half-full.

Over the bridge and far away he'd come, until he stood now before the altar in the church's dark sanctuary. The blue moonlight had the faintest hints of green and purple where it fell through the stained windows on the eastern wall, but the ceiling was dark and the pews lined behind him sat silent as a condemnatory jury. He wasn't sure that this was where he was supposed to be, but it felt right. There was nothing to hear at all, no words of praise or denigration, no reassurance that things were going to turn out the way he hoped. The wall before him was quite empty, but he imagined he could see someone standing before it, smiling and wreathed in shadow.

"I think I'm ready," he told them. "I've been here before and – and I'm not afraid."

The imaginary person didn't respond, and it may have been because it knew he was lying.

"I-I died once already," he said aloud, placing the goblet slowly on the altar. "I died once and was willing to die once more before that. And I've come to terms with it. I may not remember it, but I've been there and back. There's nothing left to fear."

The wall said nothing at all_._

The first time Victor Van Dort had agreed to die, it had been for love – a notion led entirely by a sense of romance and wonderment for a fantastical new world. He'd thought quite a lot about it over the past year, but it wasn't until then, staring down the shadows, that he realized his intentions in that moment had never truly been focused on death, but instead on the beginning of a bright new life. And when he'd leapt to save Victoria from a monster wearing a man's skin, his thoughts had been of heroism, of prevention and, again, of love – not of the possible consequences of trying and failing and falling back into the black, which was exactly what had happened. There had been tearing and pain, and an immemorable something in between. And then after a thousand years, he had been back again, remembering nothing of it, with the woman he loved at his side and the woman who loved him gone to a moonlit eternity.

He had faced death before, but with all his heart and mind he had never truly looked into the black. Now he could see it moving in the shadows in the wall, the wells of the world where the moonlight could not touch, and it rippled like wheat or ocean waves beneath a heavy mist. The view out the window. The nightlands of the soul.

Slowly, he lifted the goblet from the altar, as ritual as the rites to wed. The person before the wall dissipated, and Victor was left before the sacred stand with a jacket in one hand and a goblet of poison in the other. He was not a pious man, but he said, "Please, if anyone is listening, let me find my way down in one piece." And then he drank.

_I will be your wine._

The cup was quite empty.

He set it down once again and lifted his head to the ceiling. His mouth stung with bitter water and his hands shook like a child's. There was nothing to see in the shadows anymore but brick and mortar, and the pews stood as silent as tombstones with shadows cast across consecrated ground. For a very long time, he seemed to hold his breath.

And then came the pain. It caught in his throat and seared in his stomach like a twisted knife. He cried out and leaned forward to grasp the altar, thumping the empty goblet and knocking it onto its side. For bare seconds it cut, but was over just as suddenly as it had begun, leaving him bent and panting at the front of the room. He scrabbled at his chest to ascertain that he was not bleeding, and placed an elbow on the altar heavily to support his weight.

"Victor?" he heard asked. The voice came from behind, and he stood up then and turned around, away from the church, into a small parlor with a handsome piano beneath a window looking out on a modest moonlit garden. A brown-haired girl sat at its keys with a broad smile on her face and eyes as clear as the day itself.

Emily said happily as he stepped toward her, "Silly boy. It is good to see you."


	7. Most of My Friends are Putrid

**Who's got two thumbs and writes awful expository dialogue?! ...Me. I do. I'm not proud.**

**ಠ_ಠ**

7

"Where am I?" Victor asked, unable to entirely suppress a smile of his own. Things were not quite as he remembered them. The view out the window here was a familiar gray one, but unlike usual, this room was small and almost cozy, the ceiling low and the wallpaper striped.

"A parlor, I think," Emily said, following his gaze around the room. "Isn't it usually?"

"Yes, but not like this," he said as he approached her, his eyes fixed on the shifting scene out the window. "It's much larger in my dreams."

"Really?" Emily said, smoothing her skirts and sounding interested. Her dress was long-sleeved and modest; it might have been pink, or white, or a light feminine blue. "Well. What are dreams, anyway, but memories made bigger? Come on, sit down. We haven't got long together, and it's good to talk face-to-face."

Victor shook his head slightly. For the first time in a year, he could see her clearly as the day; her hands were fully fleshed and her hair soft rather than tangled. She was not blurred, not concealed by a hand or a lock of hair, nor rotting before his eyes – just Emily, sitting there and looking at him sort of sadly. In the sky, a cloud drifted lazily across the face of the moon.

"Did I just kill myself?" he asked, dreading the answer.

"Oh, not at all!" Emily assured him. "Well. Not yet. You're certainly less dead than I was, but poison's not good for anyone. We need to talk, and quickly. Victor," she said, placing a hand on his cheek to look him straight in the eye, "you've got to find a way back here, alright? Right back to this place. I think I can help you."

"Wait, what?" he asked, brushing her hand away and back standing up. "Oh, no. Not this. Not this again."

"What?" she asked, sounding surprised.

"The – the cryptic messages, the half-baked riddles -"

"What on earth are you talking about?" she said again.

"I've been having this dream for a year!" he cried, gesturing to the window and piano in turn. "Here, or – or someplace near enough. And you're always _here,_ and I can tell you things but when you try to speak to me everything starts to fall apart, and half the time I can't even remember your name. And now it's happening again! 'Find a way back here,' you say, while I'm already here, what does that m-"

"How does Victoria stand you?" Emily said, pressing her arched fingers against her face. "You haven't been dreaming, Victor, not entirely. You're remembering things."

It was Victor's turn to ask, "…What?"

"Your dreams are sort of – of warped memories. Well, everyone's are. You remember this place from the last time you were here."

"I don't understand," he said.

"When you _died,_ Victor_._ You were here. Everyone passes through, but few make it back, and nobody really remembers it properly. Dreams are just the right sort of upside-down mirror for it all – but that's not what's important. I'm not trying to riddle you. You've got one foot Downstairs and we haven't time for everything we need to do."

Victor blinked. This certainly felt like one of his dreams, but then again, his thoughts and vision were much clearer than he would have thought possible for a sleeping mind. (Or was that just what a sleeping person would think?) This small parlor lacked the grandness he had come to expect from it, but it still had an intimately familiar air, a grandfatherly warmth which made him feel small and appreciated. In the sky, a cloud drifted lazily across the face of the moon. There was a door in the wall near the window which he'd never noticed before – nothing elaborate, but a simple wooden door which appeared to lead to the garden outside.

"What's out there?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Emily. It was with a very strange tone in her voice. "We've only got a few seconds. Will you listen to me that you've got to come back in between, Victor?"

"In between what?"

"Life and Death," she said. "Or, Existence and Not, if you plot the Underworld on a third axis, but – oh, just find a way back, will you? And try to do it before it's too late."

Before he could respond again, he felt a sharp breeze on the back of his neck, and when he turned to investigate it, it was to find himself turning instead out of the parlor and out of the dark and into a cheerful, cobbled alley with a coffin perched against one wall. The light from a nearby streetlamp was greenish blue and the air was dry and cool, but the change was so dizzying and abrupt that Victor found himself staggering forward to lean up against the warped wooden side of a shop in order to keep his balance.

"Good Lord," he said weakly.

"Y' alright?" he heard from nearby. When Victor looked up, it was to see a blue-skinned man peering through a teller's window at him. His mutton chops were respectably grand, but he was also missing large chunk of his head and one eye was shot through with a feathered arrow. It was a transfixingly grotesque sight, and it took Victor a moment to realize that his mouth was hanging open.

"Oh! Yes, t-thank you," he said, straightening and shaking his head to clear it. He was rather dizzy. "That is, um – yes. Thank you for asking." The bushy man shrugged and retreated into the shop while Victor shook slightly and gazed down the alleyway. The Land of the Dead hadn't changed a bit, at least for what he could see. This appeared to be one of its narrower alleyways, snaked uneasily between two particularly spindly buildings and lit with only a single lamp halfway down its length. The gutters were quite black.

"Actually, erm, s-sir?" he found himself asking, stepping backward toward the window. The man popped his head out again suddenly enough that Victor found the arrow's fletching very narrowly missing his own eye.

"How can I help ya?" the teller asked cheerfully.

Victor slowly lowered a protective hand from his face. "Goodness. You don't happen to know the way to the… the pub, do you?"

"Sure enough," said the dead man. He jabbed his arrow down the road to the east. "Follow this alley past the intersection with Festering Abscess Road. Turn left on, er… Clotted Blood Way, I think, and you should see the opening to Blackbowels' Square on the right. Can't miss the pub on the corner. 'F you reach Syphilitic Skeleton Avenue, you've gone too far."

"Those sound dreadful," Victor said. "Is everything so putrid down here?"

A strange look crossed the bushy man's remaining eye. "Careful, lad," he said, somewhat gruffly. "Most of my friends are putrid. Go on, it's late to be out on the streets."

Victor ducked his head away from another of the arrow's violent swings. "Of course. Thank you. I apologize. You, um…" He gestured weakly to his own eye. "You haven't thought about having that removed?"

"What removed?" the dead man asked.

"Nevermind." He walked on.

At the end of the alley, which the street sign proudly proclaimed as being named 'Severed Achilles Tendon Court,' the young man stopped to sigh and shiver. He rubbed his arms absently and realized, with a shock, that he was no longer carrying his jacket. He double-checked his hands and took a few steps back down the street to see if he'd dropped it, but no – thinking back, he realized that he wasn't sure he'd had it since before stopping at the well Upstairs. Bother. So he continued down the road in his sleeves, treading down the green-lit avenues with a strange sense of loneliness. On one occasion he saw a corpse out on the street with him, but he paid Victor little heed beyond a polite nod and he returned the favor. It seemed an emptier town than he remembered.

He would have found Blackbowels' Square before long even without the teller's help. Many roads must have led to the center of town, because Victor had quite managed to botch up his directions by somehow ending up on a street called 'Eyeball Hemmorhage' before seeing a road on his left which opened into the square, and he stepped out from between the buildings with a small sense of relief at being free from their crushing weight. The square was much as he remembered it; the General's horse was swishing its stubby tail on the platform, and two intoxicated skeletons lay in raucous heaps at its feet. A woman's shrill voice called from a high window, "Drunkards! It's the middle of the night!" followed by the sound of clattering shutters, and both dead men roared with laughter. Victor shook his head as he ducked into the pub entrance on the square's south end.

Things inside were darker than he remembered. He stooped slightly in the low entrance, and from within caught the sound a low, crooning voice singing a song in what sounded like the wrong key. When he cleared the doorway it was to be greeted with a mostly empty bar. A few colorful lights still burned above the stage, but the chairs were up and the piano was closed. A lone skeleton sat at the tap, his back to the entrance. He had a bourbon in one hand and a bowler in the other.

_"Nobody knoows the trouble I've seeeen… Nobody knooows my soorrow…"_

"Bonejangles?" Victor asked.

The one-eyed skeleton made a stiff jolt and sat up, craning his neck toward the door with a bewildered expression on his face. "Hey, it's you!" he said after a second. "You! You dead yet?"

Victor looked at his hands. "No."

"Eh." Bonejangles paused to glance at his drink before draining it neatly, contributing to the puddle on the floor below his stool. "Well, what're you waiting for?" he asked, slamming the tumbler back on the bar. "Sit down, have a drink."

Victor obliged.


	8. Not Your Best Plan

8

The young man approached the bar as Bonejangles pulled a bottle of a dark, very thick-looking drink from what looked like his ribcage, slamming it on the wooden countertop and producing an extra cup with a flourish. "Share your woes," he said with solemnity, expertly dolloping a large splash of liquid into Victor's cup and then his own. "Ours is a night of sorrows."

"For you, too?" Victor asked, lifting the tumbler warily to identify its contents.

"Ah, my woman left me, Vince," the skeleton said with great weightiness, taking another splattering draught from his own beverage. "I got nothin' left to live for." Victor cleared his throat, taking a brief whiff of the drink and deciding that it smelled far too similar to an inkwell to be anything he was comfortable consuming. "I'm done with this. I'm not leavin' this bar fer eighteen hours. Then come Hallowe'en, I'm out."

"Out?"

"Gone. Kaput. Through with it."

"I'm not sure what you mean by that," Victor said, slightly worried. "Bonejangles, do you know very much about consumption?"

"Consumption!" the skeleton said with an angry swig. "Yeah, I been consumed before, by a pair o' pretty legs and a lot o' sweet noise. Where'd it get me? Nowhere but a bar stool and a bottle of black. I'm done." He shook his empty cup futilely. Victor proffered his own, and it was accepted without a word. The young man sighed as the viscous drink cascaded again down several vertebrae and splattered his trouser leg.

"So, heh," Bonejangles said after a moment, wiping his jaw and tilting his eyeball from one socket to the other, "you're not dead. What're you doing here?"

Victor swallowed, twisting at his collar. "T-that's actually quite a -"

"Find yourself another corpse broad?"

"— story. What? No, of course not." He took a deep breath. "I just drank a cup of poison."

"Ha! That's rough."

"I'll say," Victor mumbled, wondering whether there was anything on tap fit for human consumption, but too polite to ask.

"And you're not dead."

"Well, I don't know if it was _deadly_ poison."

"Smart," Bonejangles said, sounding mildly impressed. As he poured himself another slopping drink, Victor decided that his state of dress might be better suited to standing behind the counter. He roused himself from the stool to slide behind the bar, leaning gingerly against a rickety rack of bottles and jars.

As Bonejangles began to speak again, something about the many annoyances of women's fiddly clothes and how he was better off without that bother in his afterlife anyway, the tall young man was struck suddenly with the question of why exactly he was here. He ought to be out, shouldn't he, searching? He ought to be sprinting through the streets in pursuit of Victoria's cure! And yet, he was here, his elbow nudging a dusty bottle of _Sprits of the Damned_ and his feet near a crate of what looked like cocktail roaches, feeling quite unprecedentedly content to stay and listen to the skeleton across the bar grouse about lost love.

"And petticoats. Drive me nuts, can't imagine what it's like for the lady wearin' 'em. You ever tried to work your way through those things? Like partin' the sea."

Bonejangles' voice seemed to fade slightly as Victor felt a heavy drop in his stomach. He was happy to be here, he realized, because it seemed as good a route to his goal – whatever it was! – as anything else. He had somewhat assumed that making it to the Land of the Dead would be the hard part, but it hit him quite solidly that he had no idea where to go, or even what he was looking for.

"Oh, dear," he said under his breath. Across the bar, Bonejangles knocked back another drink and blurted, _"Crinolines!" _before groaning and lowering his skull into his bony hands. Victor felt much the same. From the kitchen entrance there came a small scooting sound, and a muffled thump.

"Bonejangles?" a rough female voice cried out. Victor looked up as a squat blue woman whom he knew well pushed apart the swinging doors, wearing a scowl and a moth-eaten sleeping gown. "Bonejangles, you souse! Who let you at the tap?" Miss Plum huffed as she stomped forward, sweeping the corner of her nightcap from her eyes. She snatched the bottle of inky black drink from Bonejangles' fingers as he slurred in protest. "You'll drink us dry!"

"'S my bar," Bonejangles said, grabbing the bottle back and immediately letting it slip from his fingers. It shattered on the floor between the barstools. "Whoops."

"Ooh, and guess who'll be the one to clean _that_ up," Miss Plum said, jabbing an angry elbow into his sternum. "Get a grip on yourself. You've been actin' like it's the end of the world around here."

"This time it is. Come Hallowe'en, I'm gone."

"You've been saying that every year for as long's I can remember."

"Yeah, well," Bonejangles muttered, wiping a bony finger through a small puddle of drink of the bar top, "'s true. I'm done." Victor stood up fully behind the bar and Miss Plum glanced toward him, seeming to notice the young man for the first time.

"Why, it's Victor!" she said, sounding a welcome combination of surprised and pleased to see him. He couldn't remember the last time anyone but Victoria had greeted him in such a manner. "Have you died, dear?"

"What?" he asked. "No."

"Nah," Bonejangles answered in turn, jerking his skull towards Victor in a fraternal manner. "He jus' had himself a poison cocktail."

"Oh," Miss Plum said, sounding lightly bemused. "Well, why under earth would you do that, dear?"

"He - that's a good question," Bonejangles said. He swiveled the stool promptly to look at the young man with his single eye. "Why'd you do that?"

Victor almost spoke, but stopped himself. There was no way of saying "_Emily told me to"_ that didn't sound stupid and insane. "M-Miss Plum," he said, ignoring the question, "do you know anything about consumption?"

"I had an uncle died of it," she said with a shrug. "Why do you ask?"

"No reason," he said, coming out from behind the counter and stepping on a piece of broken glass. He glanced down as it crunched beneath his shoe. "Victoria is… ill, is all," he murmured.

When he looked up again, it was to see Miss Plum gazing back at him with an expression of pleasant expectation. "Victoria?" she prompted him after a moment.

"My wife?" he asked.

"Ohh, of course," Miss Plum said, snapping her fingers as she scooted past Victor around the backside of the bar to retrieve a broom that was taller than herself. "That little pale thing, at the wedding. Yes, she was lovely. I'm sorry to hear about that, dear. I remember when Uncle Ruddy caught that nasty cough, it's an awful way to go."

"Thank – thank you," Victor said, even as he knew that it was a stupid response. "You don't know anyone who might – I don't know… know how to cure it, do you?"

"Hoo!" Miss Plum said. She heaved the broom past Victor once more and began to sweep up the shards of broken glass from beneath Bonejangles' stool as he graciously lifted his legbones to allow her space to work. "You're looking for cures, dearie, you might've come to the wrong place."

Victor felt his stomach sink again. "Are you sure?"

"Pretty sure," Miss Plum said, still intent on the ground. "Land of the Dead isn't much known for savin' lives, I'm afraid."

As the squat dead woman continued with her cleanup, Victor found himself gazing blankly at the stool nearest to him. From what seemed like very far away, he heard Bonejangles pipe up, "Ah, lookit him, poor kid. Hey, Vic," he added, and Victor looked up in response. "You oughta give Old Man Gutknecht a ring if you're lookin' for help. Best you can do around here. But between you and me -" he slipped on his bowler and gave the young man a pointed glance from beneath it, "- this may not have been your best plan."

Victor turned to the upper exit to the pub, at the top of a spindly flight of stairs, and saw no other real option than to begin climbing. Halfway up, he turned around to see Miss Plum disappearing back through the kitchen door and Bonejangles viewing the thin puddle of liquor still on the floor with interest.

"Erm – thank you," he said uncertainly from the stairs.

Bonejangles didn't bother to turn around. He sent a lazy wave in Victor's general direction and lifted his empty tumbler. "Cheers. You know where to find me."


	9. Being Bones

9

Victor Van Dort was not feeling his best. Perhaps it was the residual fumes from Bonejangles' noxious drink, but as he walked the winding roads Downstairs, his primary sensation was one of sharp unease. He was _tired,_ though perhaps that was to be expected – he hadn't slept in more hours than he could count – and there was a distinct, dull pain in his chest. More than anything else, he felt like an utter fool. It seemed obvious now that his decision to revisit the Land of the Dead ought to have been postponed until he had any idea whatsoever what he would be doing there, but after Victoria's collapse it had seemed imperative that he act as quickly as possible. Now he was separated from the Living with no ideas and no timeline, and on top of everything else, he was lost again.

His previous visit Downstairs had lasted nearly a day, but as easy as it was for him to consider himself deeply familiar and comfortable with the place beyond death, he didn't know his way around it very well. He'd only traveled to and from the Elder's tower once, and from a completely different direction. The streets now were quite empty and the green-edged shadows still. In the middle of a narrow alley he stopped and looked upward. The sky was starless and lit with an unearthly glow, and he felt unaccountably sad.

"Are you the man who married Miss Emily?"

The small whisper drifted up from somewhere in the shadowy gutters, causing Victor to start and glance around wildly. From behind him, something tugged sharply at his pant leg. A young voice asked again, "Sir? Are you that man who married Miss Emily, sir?"

Victor was horrified for a moment when he looked down and saw a tiny white skull gazing up at him from the shadows. As he stepped away with a cry, the small skeleton boy at his feet mirrored the action, looking penitent. "You scared him, Sammy!" came a girl's voice, and from around the corner of an adjacent alley another small corpse manifested herself. "You weren't supposed to scare him," the little skeleton girl said again as the sailor-suited boy scrambled behind her dress. "Try to not be frightening."

The young man found himself staring as the small boy made an apologetic sound. He thought he recognized the two, just children who had perhaps been skittering around the ankles of their elders on his last visit, but as far as he knew he'd never spoken to them, and he didn't know their names. "You d-didn't frighten me," he said unconvincingly, extending a tentative hand toward the both of them at the alley's opening. "I was just… startled. W-what did you say?"

The little boy stepped forward first, but the older girl spoke for him. "He asked if you were the man who married Miss Emily," she said, fixing Victor with her empty eyeholes, big black wells beneath yellow banana curls.

"I was," he said, a little warily. He didn't dislike children by any means, but he was bad enough at getting on with people his own age.

"I remember. It was so _romantic,"_ the little girl said with a sigh.

"Ech," said the boy.

"Isn't it a bit late for children to be out on the street?" he asked, straightening up and taking a step down the alley away from them. The two jogged happily to keep up with his long strides. "No," and "Not at all," they assured him with great innocence, giggling at his knees. Victor smiled with uncertainty as the two followed him down the road, making small clattering noises with every step.

"Well, you two wouldn't know the way to Elder Gutknecht's tower, would you?" he asked.

The little girl seemed thrilled at the idea of leading an expedition. "Oh, I do!" she cried, taking Victor's hand in her tiny bony one and pulling him down the road for a few yards before breaking off and running ahead. "Come with me!" The boy, Sammy, drew close to the young man and tugged again on his pant leg.

"Mister Dort?" he asked, craning his little skull upward, where it was lit a moldy green by the lamps' glow. "Do you live Upstairs with Miss Emily now?"

"What?" Victor asked, glancing down.

"Do you live Upstairs with Miss Emily? Neither of you ever came back 'til now."

"Oh," the young man said. It was strangely flattering to think that these children, to whom he had never even spoken, had had enough investment in his predicament a year ago to wonder what had become of him since then. "No, I'm afraid not," he said, slowing down a little so the boy could keep up. "I'm married to someone else now. Miss Emily went… on."

"Wow," Sammy said with awe. "I always wanted to go on!"

"Who did you marry now?" the girl asked, skipping back to where the two men were clearly taking far too long to move.

"Yes, who?"

"My fi… Her name is Victoria," Victor said, crouching above the cobbled ground. It was hard to speak to someone who barely reached his knees. "I love her very much."

"That's so romantic!" the girl said again.

"Susie thinks everything is romantic," the boy said to Victor with an air of confidence. "She's a girl."

"I do not!" said Susie. She had started walking again. "Mum and Dad were going to name Sammy 'Victoria' if he was a girl. I remember. We're almost there," she added with great authority. Victor rose again, and Sammy straightened his hat and took up the rear of the parade.

"Are your parents…?" Victor trailed off, unsure how to tactfully broach the subject with someone so young.

"Mrs. Kane?" the boy asked his sister.

"Not Mrs. Kane, Sammy. She's a _caretaker,_" Susie said, sounding exasperated. "Sammy doesn't remember Mum most of the time," she explained to Victor. "She's not here."

"Oh." He looked backward to see Sam staring up at him, his eyes as black and empty as the girl's. If their clothing was any indication, he recognized, both children had been dead for a very long time. Had they lived, they might have been his friends growing up, or adults he'd known in congregation. It was sickening to realize that these two, eternally grinning and coiffed in outfits decades out of date, might have been dead longer than he'd been alive. It suddenly didn't appropriate to think of them as mere children anymore.

Susie led them through a dark marketplace with all its windows shuttered and all its booths layered thinly with dust. Some of the lanterns here had gone out, leaving deep black patches along the walls and inside every nook. Victor was disconcerted by the atmosphere of the place, but both children seemed fine. Susie took Sam by the hand and pulled him forward around a corner, just as Victor paused to look backward. Two of the carts were labeled "Save-Your-Sole Shoes"and "Weston Peace's Postmortem Markers for the Mass-Interred," and he could have sworn that someone was waiting in the well of darkness pooled between them.

He stood stock-still for a moment, staring into the shadows with a very uneasy feeling. "Hello?" he asked, nervous with the distinct sensation that something was wrong. The shadows did not move, but a rat crawled out from beneath the cobbler's booth and sat up to look directly at Victor, its wet black eyes glinting with cool green lantern-light. He looked back for a minute with distrust before slowly turning away. The children were a ways down the alley around the corner when he saw them again, and making a surprising amount of noise for two so small. They pointed high above their heads, and Victor could see what at: The Elder's tower, just as the girl had promised, spiraling high over all the other buildings in the area. Susie took his hand again as he approached, and her brother took the other, and the two kids proudly brought Victor around to the tall steps ascending steeply about the exterior of the building.

"You're here!" Susie said, clearly expecting praise for that fact.

"Thank you," Victor said in return. The children seemed to beam up at him, though their faces were frozen. "I couldn't have done it without your superb leadership." He proffered a hand to the girl, who shook it with gravity. "I think you ought to get back to, er, Mrs. Kane now."

"She'll tan our hides!" Sam blurted, sounding delighted.

"Got no hides left to tan," Susie said to her brother as Victor began to ascend the stairs. "Threaten to let the dogs chew up our shins, most like."

Victor paused and turned around on the stairs to look back on where the skeleton children were beginning to retreat back into the maze of alleyways. "Dog?" he said loudly.

Boy and girl alike looked up.

"Sorry," he said, embarrassed. "You don't know where a dog is, do you? H-his name is Scraps."

"Scraps is nice," Sammy said.

"I think he's being bones right now, though," Susie added.

Victor took a step downward. "What?"

"Sometimes you don't want to be dead anymore, so you lie down and be bones for a while instead," Sammy answered. "It's nice."

"Like sleeping for a real long time," said Susie. "We'll tell Scraps you're here. There are a lot of dogs, but we know them all. He's good. Good bye, Mister Dort!"

"Goodbye, Mister Miss Emily!"

Victor lifted a limp hand to wave to the children's retreating forms. They began to run, yelling something too far-off for him to hear, dashing in and out of the shadows like little mice. The older girl gave her brother a shove, and as he fell to the ground his left forearm snapped clean off. With a whoop, he took hold of it and leapt to his feet again, beginning to chase his sister down the road with a brand-new club.

The young man hadn't realized that he was smiling. Having children might be something more worth looking forward to than he'd realized. He coughed slightly and turned back toward the stairs, above which the dark thick atmosphere roiled like moldering fog. Even from a low elevation he could see the nearly eternal structures of the Land of the Dead stretching toward the green-lit horizon, where the sun's strange twin seemed always just on the cusp of rising. He took one step upward, and then another. It was going to be a long ascent into the sky.

* * *

"Elder Gutknecht?"

The scene was such a familiar one to him that he could almost hear Emily's voice in place of his own, making the same curious address from so many months past. He rounded the corner and the last few steps, to be greeted with the old sight of the tower library, lit bright with candles and overflowing with books. Impossibly, there might have been even more now than a year ago. Paths were carved through the tomes that were set in curling pillars to well above his head. A raven roosting atop one column poked its beak over the side and made an unhappy clicking sound.

"Shush, Huginn." The Elder's voice emanated from somewhere within the leather-bound sea. Victor peered around, but couldn't catch sight of the ancient corpse.

"Elder Gutknecht?" he asked again.

On his right, a pallet of books was pulled back and shifted to the side. The wispy skeleton standing in the newly-revealed space coughed lightly and waved away the dust motes he'd disturbed. "There you are, my boy!" the Elder said, sounding impressed. "I didn't expect to see you again for quite a long time! Are you dead?"

"People keep asking me that," Victor said.

"Forgive me. My eye sockets aren't what they used to be," said the Elder Gutknecht, backing down the book-lined path. Victor followed with a stoop in his step, careful to avoid bringing an avalanche down on his head. On the other end of the path, the books cleared enough to reveal the path up to the high pedestal beneath the domed ceiling. The Elder began to ascend with a catch in his hip, and Victor struggled to extract himself from the tight corridor.

"Lot of books in here," Victor said uncertainly.

"Aren't there? Keep showing up, I couldn't say where from. Heaven knows what I'm going to do with them all." He sounded quite happy about it all. "Well, child," the old skeleton said as he settled before the enormous tome on the dais. "Do tell."

Victor figured there was no point in avoiding the question. "I need medicine," he said, hoping for a more affirmative response from the Elder than he had gotten from Mrs. Plum. It was not to be.

_"Medicine, _my boy?" Gutknecht said, peering dubiously down at the young man.

"My wife has consumption," he said, unconcerned with pretense. "We're having a baby, Elder, a-and I think that if I don't find something to help her they might both…"

"What's wrong with dying?" the Elder asked. That was not the response Victor had expected to hear. When he said nothing, the old skeleton seemed to soften. "No need to look contrite, my boy. I remember how it feels, but I'm afraid I have yet to find a book of miracles. Have you considered it might just be her time?"

"It can't be," Victor said.

"Everyone passes away," Gutknecht said gently. "I thought you, of all people, should understand that. What's left to be afraid of?"

Victor didn't answer that. "Please," he asked. "There must be something you can do."

There it was again, the echo of Emily's voice beneath his own. He almost thought for a moment that she was standing next to him, draped in white and pleading, but there was nothing at his side but a shoulder-high mound of books. As the last time those lines had been spoken, too, the Elder sighed and suddenly gave ground.

"I've never heard of such a thing as an end to consumption," he said, waving a hand gently at the shelves all around, "but you're free to the library. I've hardly read every book. If you find what you need, God be with you, my boy."

"Thank you," Victor said, already turning around to confront the looming ocean of print before him. There was no method to this madness, nothing resembling organization. As he pulled the first book from the first pile and cracked it open, he was hit with the enormity of the task before him. There were millions of pages to read in this room, and no clear starting point.

_What's wrong with dying?_

In his mind's eye he saw two children running through the necropolis, timeless as any one of these ancient manuscripts. Everything stopped changing after death, but if there was one thing Victor Van Dort knew, it was that he was looking forward to a future far different from things the way they were today.

He'd always liked reading, anyway, and the book was open in his hands.

_Chapter One._


	10. Grease Fires

10

It was coming slowly to light that Victoria did not enjoy being pregnant very much.

Not that she would ever bring such up in conversation. Certainly not with her mother, who despite likely sharing the sentiment would scold her for resenting her wifely duties. Not with any of the old women she'd once known from church, who now cooed over her in the village square and offered their congratulations and winking advice on how best to enjoy her fertile years. Not even with Victor, who in his quiet and stumbling way seemed thrilled at the prospect of fatherhood and couldn't imagine any downsides to it.

It seemed to her, of course, that there was little to like about rising each and every morning sore as if with fever, and feeling constantly tender and slightly ill. It wasn't as though she didn't love her daughter. She'd known for a long time now that she did, the bright light of life reaching out curiously from within her to writhe and kick at the imminent world. _Emily,_ they were going to name her. It was really a lovely name.

It was just a humble fact that if little Emily was not born by the end of November, Victoria was going to go utterly mad.

She woke on the morning of October 31st with her head pounding and swinging like a clock's pendulum, her mouth full of cotton and an aching nausea in her throat. She fell immediately back into the pillows when she tried to raise her head, and ended up lying half-awake in pain for what seemed like a very long time before Mrs. Hall knocked on the door.

"Mister Van Dort?" she called, strangely. The housekeeper was usually tactful enough to address Victoria as the only occupant of the room, whether she knew otherwise or not.

The young woman took a deep, hard breath and coughed harshly. "It's o-only me," she managed to say. The housekeeper entered the room with a characteristically concerned look on her face.

"Miss Victoria," she said. "How do you feel?"

"Not so well, I'm afraid," Victoria said quietly, sitting up in bed. She stared down at her hands atop the quilt, bleached white in a stripe of morning light. The young woman half-recalled her time in the garden yesterday, a big dark bird and a butterfly on the gate, but after that, things became muddled and black. "I do remember there was a reason I didn't want opium."

"Well, you needed it," Mrs. Hall said bluntly, pushing open the drapes so that the sliver of sunlight on Victoria's fingers turned into a great glowing plane across the bed. "Are you well enough to rise, or would you like breakfast here?"

Victoria winced as she tried to shift in bed. "I'll be fine," she said thinly, throwing back the covers. Every last bit of her ached. "I'll be fine," she said again, her voice much quieter this time.

"I'll draw you up a bath, if you'd like," said the older woman as she cracked open the window. The air was sweet and shockingly cold.

"Thank you," Victoria said, smoothing her nightgown with a small smile and a cough. "I'd like to have breakfast with Victor, if possible." She imagined he must be sick with worry for her. It was the least she could do to show him that she was still functional. The housekeeper slowed slightly in her movements toward the wash room.

"Has he been in this morning?" she asked with a strange inflection.

"Hmm?" Victoria asked. "No, I haven't seen him. I just woke up."

"Ah," said the older woman, stopping and then shaking her head. "No reason to worry. He may have gone down to the square this morning."

"You haven't seen him?"

"No," said Mrs. Hall. "I'm sure he'll be back soon." She offered Victoria a thin smile which was likely meant to be comforting, though it looked alien on her face. "Rest," she encouraged the young woman as she tried to rise from bed. "I'll be back in a tick."

Victoria abhorred the idea of staying in bed all day, but it was hard to deny that climbing out of the depths of the feathery mattress in her condition was going to be quite a lot of work. She breathed painfully and looked toward the window, outside of which the tops of a few pines could just barely be seen at the edge of the sill. The sky was white and the weather was calm, but her daughter was as restless as she was at the idea of rising to see the day.

"Hush," she said to the room out loud before self-consciously covering her mouth. She felt unduly embarrassed. The _Ladies' Book of Etiquette_ seemed to be staring her down from the night table; there was most probably a line within that read, _"It is always improper for a woman of any fair birth to speak to her children before they are born, indicating an imbalance of the mind that an infant still in the womb should be able to hear her admonitions or praises. Grace forbid that this unfortunate habit ever manifest in the pleasant company of one's social betters!"_ It was very much like having her mother by her bedside at all times.

Maybe Victor had been right in suggesting that it be thrown in the fireplace.

* * *

At one o'clock in the afternoon, Victoria had long since bathed and dressed and broken her fast, but Victor was yet to be seen in the house. The young Mrs. Van Dort found herself idling in the drawing room with her stitching, far more of her attention being paid to the window's view of the street than to what her fingers were doing with the needle. It was silly of her to be concerned, of course – what on earth could he have reasonably gotten up to? – but it wasn't as though he'd never disappeared without warning before. Perhaps he was calling on his parents, or making amends with the pastor in hopes that he would be willing to christen the baby when she was born. Really, the time in their lives in which they'd been occasionally whisked off to the Underworld was long past. The most exciting thing that happened to them these days was the occasional grease fire in the kitchen, and with that, Victoria could be quite content. Her daughter, however, seemed not to be, and was keeping up such a persistent fuss that Victoria thought several times that she might be ill. Overall, this had not been her most healthful day, and the worry on her mind wasn't helping at all.

She pricked her finger slightly as the clock chimed half an hour past one. Now on top of everything else she was bleeding, and not a single person had come down the street toward the Van Dorts' house since long before noon.

Suddenly, Victoria knew she couldn't bear it any longer. It just wasn't like him not to leave a note, not to tell anyone where he was going or what his intentions were. She rose from the armchair by the window with a shuddering cough and set aside her sewing basket. Mrs. Hall could be heard in the kitchen at the other end of the house, but Victoria felt an aching need to move. Maybe, just maybe, he had come home without anyone noticing.

Her ascent of the servants' stairs wasn't an easy one, but she felt she needed to make absolute certain again that he wasn't in the master bedroom, or the powder room (why would he be in there?), or even in the back garden, sketching in secret so that she might not be tempted to join him and feed another attack like yesterday's. As she'd expected, though, less than five minutes' searching confirmed that he was nowhere in the upstairs, so she returned to the ground floor with a deeply sick feeling in her chest and a throat that seemed suddenly more prone to irritation than ever before.

She searched the drawing room that she had just left and the dining room with no hiding places, coughing all the while. At the back of her mind, she knew she was working herself up into a fit, but she certainly couldn't rest as if nothing was wrong. He wasn't in the washroom and he wasn't hiding under any cabinets, like an errant book or shoe. She felt on the verge of tears in her search, though whether it was genuine distress or just another unenviable side effect of being with child, she couldn't say.

When she finally threw open the study doors, it was to be greeted with a shocking gust of cold air that stung her lungs and sent her doubled-over with coughing. In perfect time to contribute to her misery, the baby gave a sharp twist, and she dropped to her knees in the doorway with a moan. "Oh, Lord," she whispered as she knelt above the floor, no longer mindful of the judgmental advice she was sure her etiquette book would have had in store for her. "The sooner you're born, the better." She wasn't sure how enthusiastic she was going to be about having a second child after this.

When the shuddering pain had finally passed, she let her shoulders drop and her eyes drift upward across the floor. The study was a mess, and it was little wonder why; the window on the east wall was standing wide open, and the wind had scattered the papers Victor normally kept so meticulously stacked atop the desk and shelves. A candle stub had been knocked onto the floor, and dozens of pages lay curled beneath chairs or swept back up against the far wall. Victoria took a shallow breath to calm herself and presently rose, carefully smoothing her hair and skirts back into their pre-wheezing arrangements. She didn't have control over many things in life, but she did at least have charge of her appearance, and consumption would not take that away from her.

She moved slowly across the room, gathering charcoal and quills and bits of parchment where they had fallen. There were sketches here, many of them of butterflies, some of herself (she was always silently pleased by Victor's interpretation of her features, much kinder than any she'd ever heard from her mother or father), and a few of things she'd never seen – of long views over the rooftops of a spindly city, and of a branch, or perhaps a skeletal hand, reaching up from out of the ground. Here and there were pages of writing as well, mostly scientific observations of insects, but a few that might have been journaling. She caught a snippet every few pages or so – _"Wingspan of nearly six inches (!)", "proven that maggots aboveground do not speak in the least",_ "_happy for a short while was a joy to me, and I would give anything to insure" _– but for the most part she respected her husband's private thoughts enough not to pry.

The papers were deposited in an orderly pile atop the desk and held secure with a full inkwell before Victoria turned to the window to attempt to close it. Considering how often Victor used the study, he did not do a reliable job of keeping the window's hinges oiled. Victoria grunted and heaved, once, twice, before managing to pull it closed with a slam, sending the drapes fluttering and a thousand motes of dust drifting into the air. She waved them away and coughed into her hand, dreading the deep, shredding sensation that always accompanied a truly bad fit. Once again, she felt a hard twist deep in her abdomen, leaving her gripping the windowsill for a moment as she groaned and coughed and gritted her teeth. It had really been a mistake to leave bed this morning. Perhaps she ought to just go back to sleep until December came.

From the entrance hall, she could hear an echoing knock on the door. Standing upright with a hand on her chest, she swallowed deeply and checked herself once again for orderliness before leaving the study. Mrs. Hall was already in the entrance hall when she emerged; Victoria felt her heart leap for a moment at the idea that it might be Victor at the door, but was disappointed to see a red-haired young boy on the step instead, wearing an acolyte's cloth.

"How can I help you?" Mrs. Hall said to the young man, none too friendly. Victoria hung back slightly by the stairs. If he wasn't looking for her, she wasn't quite in the mood to talk.

"My apologies, ma'am," said the boy, who looked all of twelve years old and terrified by the tall gray woman blocking his entrance to the house. "P-Pastor Galswells said he, um, wouldn't be seen on the stoop of sinners..."

"What on earth are you talking about?" asked the housekeeper, sounding a bit aggressive.

"I'm sorry," the boy squeaked, backing down a step. "The pastor found these in the church. He – I was told these are yours," he finished abruptly, shoving a bundle into Mrs. Hall's hands and scampering away. "ThankyouforyourtimeGodbless!" Victoria heard him call from the street before the housekeeper closed the door and unfurled the cloth she'd been handed with an angrily perplexed look on her face.

"What is this rubbish?"

"Wait -" Victoria heard herself saying.

The bundle in her hands was made of brown wool.

As the neatly-tailored jacket unrolled toward the ground, a heavy pewter something fell from its center. The cup rolled toward Victoria with a purr against the floor, exposing its red-stained mouth with a sort of indecency. She stared as Mrs. Hall made a small oath.

"Is this -?" she began.

"I think so," said Victoria, stepping forward to take Victor's jacket from her. "And they found it in the church…?" The older woman bit her lip, but Victoria could feel an indignant heat beginning to radiate off of her. She said nothing. Surely it didn't mean anything.

This was surely no more extraordinary than a bad day or a grease fire, and that was just how Victoria liked it.


	11. Bad News All Around

**Many apologies. I intended to have this chapter submitted by Friday, but then I realized that_ Sherlock_ exists and my weekend productivity dropped to 0 because I was busy feeling clever by association and molesting British men with my eyeballs.**

11

It hadn't been intentional, but somewhere between the countless hours of reading Victor had fallen asleep on a book and was now having a most enjoyable dream. For once, it wasn't prophetic or a look into the dark rooms between life and death, but rather a charmingly clear view of a pebbled riverbed, where small fish rested between the rocks with sunlight playing off of their backs. When he turned the page in his mind, all of the water poured out of the book and flooded the room where Victoria was sitting in a high armchair before him, smiling and clearly in good health. He had never been so glad to see her; river water lapped at her ankles, and the world was simple and bright. He'd rarely felt so at peace.

All dreams do end, though, and this one was interrupted with the sensation of a small sharp jawbone scraping along his fingers. Victor lifted his head from his knees blearily to see a tiny white shape leaping away from him. When it saw that he was awake, it gave an eager yip.

"Scraps?" Victor murmured, not entirely sure he wasn't still dreaming. The dog wiggled happily and tucked himself in between his master and the large stack of volumes at his side, which ranged through the titular letter S on all topics relating to sigils, stones, and scapulimancy. After the first hour, Victor had begun to realize that he was simply not going to make any progress without some sense of where to go. From there on, it had been a simple matter of organizing books by subject as he came across them – or simple in theory, anyway. Some titles had proven difficult to categorize. _On the Undulating Oneness of the Primordial Scolex _and _Forgiving Sodom: A Love Story _still lay off in their own little corner of the room entirely. The tall young man laid his face atop his knees and thought how nice it would be to fall back asleep.

No time for that, though. With a sigh, he sat up and blinked at the tome open on the ground next to him, a dense volume with even denser content. There was a lot of talk of hellfire involved. Hauling it into his lap as Scraps nuzzled his elbow, he looked up only briefly as he heard the light shuffling of bony feet on the ground around the corner, and the Elder Gutknecht manifested around a knee-high stack of books.

"Ah, not a bad job," the old skeleton said, adjusting his glasses as he scanned the newly-organized books. "When you do die, I might have work for you here!" He gave a small sigh when the young man didn't respond. "I wanted to apologize, my boy," he said. "What I said earlier was… well, it was cruel. I remember being young. There's nothing worse than seeing those you love go before their time."

Victor didn't look up from the book in his lap. Already the text was beginning to swim before his eyes, exhausting him with its mere appearance.

"It's no use," he heard himself say, hollowly. Scraps whimpered. "I'm never going to find anything here. It's been hours, and I can't – see -" He rubbed furiously at his eyes. "You were right. What can I do?" He was so tired that it hurt. "It's been hours. I've looked at hundreds of books, and not one of them with a positive thing to say. It's all how to poison your enemies or, or evoke the Worm of Time and Dust." He shook his head. "You'd think that there's no way to… stop death when it's coming."

"You'll forgive me for saying so," the Elder said, "but I think most dead men would be insulted that it was such a preoccupation for you in the first place."

Victor didn't know what to say to that, so he stared down at the tome in his lap, a wicked-looking thing bound in red leather. He re-opened it miserably to one of the pages he'd not yet seen, replete with occultic symbols and several inky skulls in each page's corner.

_"So withine the circle shall there be laid the chaines of bondage of the Dead; and betwixte them opened that most gaping Hellish path, the echoing tunnel of the Screaming Damned -"_

"What is this?" he asked without thinking.

"Hmm?" the Elder said, turning up the cover to see it. "Ah, that's just Berival. Don't read it, he's quite insane." He flipped the book closed with a little puff of dust. "Now, _this_ might be a little more to your liking…"

The book he brandished from almost nowhere was quite a bit smaller. The words embossed in flaking gold on its cover read _Þe Byrðen__af Inníwian Lífes. _Victor took it from the old skeleton's hands and opened the cracked leather. Inside there was no title page, but an ink drawing of a lit candle. One page further, and he was greeted with line after line of what looked like Old English, with handwritten annotations scribbled tightly in the margins.

"This…?" he asked again, looking up.

"_'The Charge of Renewed Life,'_" the Elder said, patting the little book. "Very rare volume. I wasn't sure owning it hadn't been a dream, but here I've managed to find it again." He fixed Victor with a sad, fatherly look. "It's not precisely what you were hoping for, but I think you'll find it interesting.''

Victor squinted at the page. The annotations were tiny and extraordinarily dense, but they were English. Scraps gave a small whine at his side and the young man absently scratched the little dog on the skull as he began to read.

_"Translation recorded 1789 by the late Sir Engelbert Hottensworth, formerly of Pearshire. Original text attributed to Aldercy, d. 1345._

_"Know ye spirit is but a candle's flame, born of existence and burning long after death. We Old Dead do crave the Heavenly light oft elusive in dreams, tho few understand the divine release from existence that might be found in the fire, which when shared shows the path into the deep places between our Life and Death."_

_"I have heard a woman's tale, trifling tho they oft are, as she joined me in my tower in this our prisonous Purgatory. It was of great interest to me that she told her most recent death had not been her first. Once in life hers had been a love shone brighter than the sun, a man of virtue we in our weary antiquity would call a creature of legend. They two lived their lives in the sole service of one another until the day that their Cruel Lord came from his hilltop to quench the life from the bride, jealous for their Blessed happiness. _

_"Her moral husband wept whilst she found herself woken in the most curious of places, she said: a corridor the likes of which she had rarely known in life but which brought her great comfort in death. She had nearly crossed through the door at the end when her lover did speak a Word to her, heard from beyond the grave, and she turned and left the hall. When she woke again, it was in her lover's arms, to embrace him one last time before he left this world for another, transformed into a great hart. For the rest of her long days she mourned, but in dreams, oft she found herself walking hand-in-hand through long corridors with her worthy husband, he who sacrificed Heaven to rekindle the flame of Life in one he loved more than Death could contain."_

"Sounds familiar, doesn't it?" the Elder said. Victor stood up slowly. He hadn't realized that his hand had drifted slowly over his chest, which was throbbing with dull discomfort. It did indeed sound very familiar, though he'd never told anyone about his dreams – well, no one but Victoria, now. He wondered suddenly whether she'd come across the note he'd left her. Perhaps he ought to have left it on her bedside instead.

Scraps barked sharply as a very hard pain hit Victor in the chest where the throbbing sensation had originated. He gritted his teeth with a small noise as he waited for it to pass. It was surely just exhaustion.

"Are you alright, son?" the Elder asked him.

"I'm fine," he said, shrugging off the pain. He straightened up slowly, still holding the ancient book. "Elder Gutknecht, you've read this?"

"I've been looking for it since the night your wedding was called off because the groom was risen and the bride was made of insects," said the old skeleton with uncharacteristic dryness. "Rather odd day, that one."

"This is…" He flipped through the half-translated book. "This is what happened."

"Is it?"

"Yes! This is exactly, with – with the dreams…" He trailed off with his eyes on the last line of the page. '_He who sacrificed Heaven to rekindle the flame of Life in one he loved more than Death could contain.'_ The twisting in his chest seemed suddenly to double as he read the words over and over again. He closed his eyes and the Elder regarded him with a penetrating expression on his bleached face.

"I never did ask how you managed to find your way down here on your own," he said.

The young man took a deep breath. Plainly, he said, "It was poison." The Elder tilted his head upward but said nothing in response.

"Perhaps you should rest," he suggested.

"I slept some," Victor said distractedly. He leaned against one of the high pillars of books and then quickly stepped away when he felt it shift behind him. "What time is it?"

"Time?" the Elder asked bemusedly. "No such thing here. Upstairs, though…" He craned his stooped head upward to peer across the city of books. Victor had a rather better view; on one of the far walls, he noticed for the first time, there sat an assortment of clocks whirring quietly to themselves. "Noon, or thereabouts. There's no direct conversion, and I don't keep the clocks as well-winded as I ought to." Victor almost immediately wished that he hadn't asked. His new knowledge of just how little he had slept made his eyes begin to ache again and brought out a soreness in his neck he'd managed not to notice before now. Scraps leapt up to nuzzle his palm, offering a sympathetic whimper.

"A bite to eat?" the Elder said.

Now, that was hard to object to. Victor hadn't eaten in longer than he could remember. "It w-would be appreciated," he said, feeling that same sallow awkwardness that always manifested in him at the idea of accepting another's favors. Even when they were offered freely, he could not kill his crippling fear of imposing on another person. The Elder either did not register the sudden fault in the young man's composure or did not care. He waved Victor around the corner and led him out of the literary labyrinth toward the podium atop which he often stood.

Behind it and beneath several scattered books lay, curiously, a trap door. The old skeleton beckoned Victor down a long, gently-inclined staircase which ended on a wooden landing that creaked beneath their feet. The area beneath the tower library was surprisingly cozy. A hearth crackled with cheerful green flame and two windows set on either side of it showed a dim view of the cityscape and the faint-lit horizon. There were fewer books here than upstairs, but still enough to give the area an air of antique respectability.

"Sit down, sit down," the Elder said as he hobbled toward a closed bookshelf. There were two armchairs before the fire, both winged and very stiff-looking. Victor seated himself in one and thought that the library floor had been more comfortable. The gold embossing on the book in his hands was glinting green in the firelight. He eyed the unreadable title with a weary eye.

_To rekindle the flame of Life in one he loved more than Death could contain._

Victor flipped the book open again to scan the pages as the Elder came shuffling back with a tin of biscuits in his bony hand. Only about a third of the book had been translated, and much of that smeared or damaged by water. He reached absently for the tin as it was offered to him and took a small bite of a biscuit that, as it turned out, may have been a few decades old, turning immediately to dust in his mouth. He coughed horribly at the taste and looked at the gray wafer in the firelight for a moment before slipping it down next to the armchair while the Elder's back was turned. The small crunching noise from the floor a few seconds later told him that Scraps had not forgotten their old dinnertime ritual.

He stared at the fire while the Elder pulled down books from their shelves, talking happily about their histories. Victor's mind was far away, deep within the pages of the unreadable little book in his hands while the fire played with the shadows on his lap. He could see, in his mind's eye, the last sight of Emily that he'd ever caught – just the little shine of her, disappearing towards the moon while he lifted himself from the ground.

_He who sacrificed Heaven…_

Oh, God.

It all made sense. He understood the story perfectly. If there was fire in life and dark in death, certainly there was only so much light to go around. If the spark was given away to another, there was nothing left to move on to Paradise or – or whatever else might be out there. The only part of a person left to live on must remain in he who had been brought back. It was a – it was a very troubling thought, actually. To think that there was anyone in his life who would have done such an intimately sacrificial thing for his sake was surprisingly distressing, and he wasn't sure why. He'd loved Emily, after all – he was sure he had – but the idea of having been loved by her in return, well and truly loved, was making him feel ill, and he was sure he was an absolute bastard for it.

Victor stood up slowly, staring at his hands while the firelight drew smoky shapes across his knuckles. It didn't look right; the skin was too dark, too easily accepting of the fire's green light. He drew his hands close to his face – and there it was. Just the slightest tinge of blue within his pale skin, like water inside a vase.

"I'm… dying," he said quietly.

The Elder looked up from his piled books and reached out slowly to take Victor's hand without comment, almost as if he'd been expecting to hear such a thing. "Mm," he said, adjusting his wire glasses. "Oh, dear." Truth be told, Victor wasn't sure he hadn't been expecting it himself. Was there ever a chance that drinking deadly poison was going to be a consequence-free exercise?

Victor looked blankly down at his dog, who was still flexing his jaw in the manner he would have if he'd still had a tongue with which to lick crumbs from his muzzle. He pulled away from the Elder without much of a thought. "Come here, Scraps. Elder," he said, looking at the skeleton again, "how long do you think I have?" That was all he wanted to know – just a timeline.

The Elder Gutknecht said, "That rather depends on the poison."

"The Wine of Ages. Old, dried, d-diluted in water."

"Ah." The Elder sounded almost impressed. "Give yourself twelve hours on the outside. Dare I ask where you came upon it?"

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," Victor said, tired beyond all description and feeling very unlike himself. He wasn't even as upset as he'd expected to be. There was a sort of gentle numbness in all his extremities that bade him to focus. He set down the Old English book and reached out to shake the Elder's hand, saying, "Thank you for having me. I think I'll be back. I just need to go – out – for a bit. A bit of fresh air. If that's alright."

The old skeleton returned the shake with gravity. "The books will be here when you get back, my boy. I'll do a bit of reading while you're out. Here's hoping the fresh air does you well."

"Thank you," he said absently, returning to the stairs and ascending them to the open trap door in just a few long strides. Scraps trotted along behind, clearly intuiting that something was wrong but unable to understand what. The young man had very nearly exited the room when he heard a voice call from behind.

"Victor?"

He turned around to see the decrepit skeleton looking up at him from next to the fire. It was the first time he thought he'd ever heard the Elder call him by his name. "I am sorry this is happening," he said, and he looked it. "Sometimes it's hard to remember what it's like to have so much potential. Things don't change in the Land of the Dead. They only fall apart." He paused a moment to cough. "That's the difference between life and death, you know. Life gets to grow. Everyone needs that chance before they pass. You and yours deserve better."

Victor tried to say thank you, but he had no words left. He offered the Elder a nod that he may not have even been able to see in the darkness, and turned abruptly to leave. He craned his neck upward as he rose into the library. A raven crawwed at him from atop the podium as he turned to view the high domed ceiling, behind which the sky sat as heavy as the earth.

_Things only fall apart._ That they did.

"Come on, Scraps," he said gently to his loyal little dog, happy to see him even when the world was ending. "Let's go for a walk."

* * *

**Holy hell was this a hard chapter to write, and I'm still not very happy with it. If anyone has criticism on how it can be improved, I would be deeply grateful to hear it. ****I think I have just saddled myself with way too much plot and backstory in this fic, all for the sake of justifying a stupid change to the movie's end that I just *had* to make because I'm a sucker for a heroic sacrifice. In related news, keep an eye out for this becoming a running theme throughout this story - and the next. Everybody dies. This is going to be fun!**


	12. A Good Reason to Drink

**This chapter is dedicated to Flaming Trails, who saved it from the cutting room floor with her love of making me struggle to write characters under the influence (me and the characters both, there).**

**Before we begin, a quick note. As no name please pointed out in her very helpful review, many of the characters in this story (Victor in particular) seem to be reacting to death in a very passive manner, not giving quite enough gravity to the situation as might be warranted. This observation is absolutely correct, and is probably the biggest issue with the fic as I've been writing it so far. The reason for it is that - well, has anyone noticed that the Corpse Bride universe never clearly establishes a reason for why death is a bad thing? There are literally no consequences for dying beyond the end of bodily homeostasis. You remain aware, you get to see all your friends, rock and roll all night and party every day, and all with the added bonuses of feeling no pain or hunger or suffering for the rest of eternity. Screw life, death is where it's at.**

**You can imagine that this makes a 'race to save a life' plot ring rather hollow. It has taken me a very long time (as in, until the last couple chapters) to figure out just why anyone ought to be bothering. The answer I've come up with was broached at the end of chapter eleven - the concept that once you are dead, you are no longer allowed to grow and change in any capacity - but this is still a rather abstract deterrent, so until I find a way to make that clear within the story proper, I might as well submit the topic here, while I keep gasping in the shallows like a dying trout.**

**Goodness, this didn't end up being a quick note at all. On to the story now!**

12

The Land of the Dead had never seemed so alive. In a place without time and far beneath the earth, it must have been by some authority that its residents had determined that this hour was to be one of wakefulness, a strange mirror of the daytime. Proper ladies lined the streets in tainted gowns, one or two with skeletal fans draped delicately across their faces. A tailor behind his shop window took the measurements of a man who was missing everything below the sternum, and a gaunt and crow-pecked owl perched atop a butcher's signpost, glaring at the crowds and occasionally giving a long, _ooo_ing sigh. The streetlamps had been turned high, there was music in the alleys, and a couple of blanched men were balancing atop precarious ladders to hang a sign between the tall buildings – "_MERRY HALLOWE'EN!"_ it read.

Victor had hats tipped to him along the streets and friendly "Hullo!"s offered up and down from both those he recognized and those who were strangers to him. There was a string quartet in the center of Blackbowels' Square when he arrived, fiddling a jaunty tune while the horse on the pedestal whisked its tail back and forth. Scraps yipped and ran to catch it. A vendor at a very crowded kiosk was handing out sloshing beer steins by the dozen, and the laughter and goodwill in the air was like a thick froth atop the intoxicating revelry of the occasion. It would have been quite enjoyable to witness if it had not been the worst day of Victor's life.

Even from out on the street, the Ball and Socket could be heard buzzing like a hive. A posse of very heavily made-up skeletal women was gathered at the door, giggling and glancing within. A few made chirping noises at Victor as he passed them in the entryway; he smiled nervously at their calls and ducked into the pub's upper landing, where the faint shadows of the street bled into the bright lights of the interior. The bar was positively glowing in green and orange and blue, couples and singles gathered at the tap to celebrate with their voices low. The band onstage played a strange, syncopated melody as Victor descended the stairs two at a time; there was a very strange air here, a distinctly resigned melancholy beneath the high spirits.

"Why, 'f it isn't Victor!"

The young man turned to see his parents' once-employee, Mayhew, nodding to him over a drink from a niche beneath the staircase. He didn't have a chance to respond before a skeleton grabbed him around the shoulders and herded him toward the dead man, laughing loudly. "'Ere, lad, have an ale!" A slopping pint was pushed into his hands and someone patted him on the back. "Merry 'Allowe'en t' you, sir!"

"Merry, um… Thank you -" Victor said bewilderedly to the mystery corpse, who seemed to have disappeared. Mayhew looked on with a blithe smile.

"Now, what're you doin' back down 'ere?" he asked, draining his stein with a satisfied slurp.

"That's a, uh…" Victor said, glancing at the drink in his hand, "quite a story."

"Always a story," the hunchbacked man said with a shake of his head. "You live a more interestin' life than most, Mister Van Dort."

"I do, don't I?" Victor said, not altogether pleased by it. The lights were going down in the pub; the crowd turned to the stage, where the focus had been placed on a woman ascending the steps in the remains of a crinoline. She was older than Victor and at least a year or two dead, with her skin stretched tight across her rogued face. She gestured with a flourish before the piano and blew a wink and a kiss into the audience, which responded enthusiastically. "Dottie!" they called. "Dottie May!" Victor chanced a glance toward the bar and was somewhat surprised to see Bonejangles sitting exactly where he said he'd be, his bowler pulled low to cast his single eye in shadows. His was the only gaze in the room not directed toward the front.

Victor sidled toward the tap, trying very hard to look natural about it. "Um," he said. He had never been good at initiating conversation, much less with someone who looked like he was contemplating setting fire to all the alcohol.

Bonejangles tilted his head so his eye rolled into view beneath the bowler rim. "Ah. 'S you," he said, sounding more gruff than Victor had ever heard him before.

"Q-quite the occasion?" Victor asked, leaning against the bar top. Not for the first time, he lamented being too tall to fit anywhere in comfort.

"Mm," Bonejangles said. A sweet, sad piano was beginning to drift over the air as the crowd picked up its chatter. The woman onstage had taken over the ivory and closed her eyes. Her hoop skirt was partially collapsed over the bench on which she sat. "Well, Hallowe'en," the skeleton spoke up again. "Las' hurrah for some of us."

"How's that?" Victor asked, sliding ungainly onto the stool.

"'S when a corpse can get stuff done," Bonejangles said as his eye alit upon the stein that Victor had forgotten he was holding. "What's that?"

"Oh." He placed the drink of the bar top. "Ale."

"Ale!" Bonejangles snorted. "What are we, women?" He reached across the bar to snag a wicked-looking bottle. "Now, what brings you back to our miserable little corner of the underworld?"

No one else in the pub seemed miserable. "Oh," Victor said, his eyes lingering on the stained bar top, "you know, the usual. I'm… d-dying."

"And that's good a reason to drink as I've heard all day," said Bonejangles, handing the young man a thin-sided whiskey glass with a tip of the hat. "Cheers." He didn't wait for Victor to respond before draining his own cup with a hiss of alcohol on bone and immediately slamming his face down on the bar. It was startling.

Victor didn't imbibe often, and certainly not of anything stronger than wine. He'd heard that his grandfather had been very fond of malt whiskey, but this was just another reason in his mother's eyes to ensure that such low-class liquor never made it into their home. He'd never seen much point to drinking; it smelled awful, tasted worse, and he already did a fine job making a fool of himself sober. He placed the whiskey glass carefully on the bar and let his eyes drift back up to the stage, lit in soft blue the precise color of the dead woman's face. She might have been quite beautiful in life. Now she had a stringy, tough look about her, like a piece of meat cooked too long.

"Damn shame, innit?" Bonejangles said from Victor's other side, lifting his head from the countertop. He was beginning to slur his words and sounded very, very bitter. "Lady of the night, now playin' for this lot in eternity. You think she's proud o' that? 'Magine bein' the father gets the news that's how his little girl went, burned up in a brothel. How d'you think that feels?"

"I can't even imagine," Victor said quietly.

There must have been something in his voice, because Bonejangles poured himself another cup of whiskey and said, "Didn't know you had kids."

"I don't," Victor said. "Well, I do. I'm about to, I suppose."

"Y' sound enthusiastic."

"I am," he said, worried at the idea of not sounding proud enough at being a father. What would Victoria think? It was going to be wonderful, surely. It was hard to ignore the sad, selfish little part of his mind, though, that wished his daughter could have waited to come into existence for another couple of years, when they were a tad more prepared, when things were calmer, when Victoria was well again. When all the good character he'd surely built during his first marriage had sunk in and made him feel like a proper adult. When there wasn't such a great chance that he might have to face a life with the child who had taken his wife away from him –

And with that, the worst thought he'd ever had, Victor supposed he understood why people drink.

Not for the first time, not even for the first time that day, he questioned what he was doing. What in heaven and hell was the point of it all? He'd already lost. He, the persistent idiot, hadn't managed to take the first step to helping Victoria without shooting himself in the heart. Even now he didn't know what that first step was supposed to be. He imagined that he was the one up at the piano on the stage, and felt overwhelmed with sadness. That was his future. It always had been. Whether he died in a day or in a lifetime, in the end he would always have a place at that piano.

The whiskey glass was still sitting on the bar. 'Forget your woes,' they always said of liquor, and it was an awfully tempting promise at the moment. He'd hardly ever been so woeful before. He, and everyone he loved, was going to die, and distressingly, he still couldn't quite articulate why that was such a bad thing.

Could you even taste whiskey when you were dead? This might be his last ever chance to do so. Taking a cue from Bonejangles, he lifted the cup with a bold hand and knocked back most of the glass in one swig.

This turned out to be a bad idea.

He'd heard many times that a strong drink is good for dulling the pain, but he hadn't expected it to cause so much pain in its own right. It burned his throat like lamp oil or some other foul thing that ought never be drunk, and left him feeling a very strange combination of hot and cold inside. The taste was even worse than he'd imagined, but by far the most startling thing about it was the immediate effect it had on his head. He'd seen men partake in a strong drink after dinner with regularity, but based on their composed manners he wouldn't have ever guessed that it made one feel the way it did. His mind was reduced to a foggy crawl, stunned with drink, and every movement he made seemed to ask a moment for his brain to catch up. Of all the experiences he could have done without before he died, whiskey was certainly included.

Without a word, Bonejangles reached across the bar to refill Victor's glass. "Oh, no," he said, pushing it away. "I'm not doing that again." His tongue felt weirdly soft.

"'S always how it starts," Bonejangles said, placing the bottle back on the bar with a thump. He swiveled sharply on the stool to look toward the stage before turning back with a grumble. "Get burned once, oh no, never doing that again. Y' know better. But it's sweet. 'S sweeter when it lasts than it is sour when it ends. Y' always do it again." Victor was struggling mightily with maintaining concentration. Perhaps drunkenness was like nausea – if you thought about something else for long enough, it would go away.

"You… you must have loved her quite a lot," he said. The words were hard to come by, but once they'd been found they seemed to roll off his tongue quite easily. He wasn't stuttering. In fact, _not_ stuttering seemed so incredibly simple, he was almost mad at himself for never being able to control it before.

"Ah, what do I know about love?" the skeleton said, just picking up the bottle and pouring a good ounce through his jawbone. "The hell does anyone know about love?"

"I know about love," Victor said, a little surprised at himself for being so forthcoming about it.

"Nah, you don't."

"I do! Love is – is gentle, and kind, and… understanding… and it means you never have to be alone again."

"Heh." Bonejangles drug a bony finger through a sticky spot on the counter before looking up at Victor. "Don't you sound like our Emily, and a fat lot of good that attitude ever did for her. You kids have stars in yer eyes an' think love's all there is. It'll kill you 'fore you know otherwise."

"What?" Victor asked. His intoxicated brain was having its share of trouble understanding Bonejangles' own drunken ramblings.

"I'll tell ya. When that girl first showed here, all pretty brown hair and white lace, she was cryin' her eyes out and we had ourselves a talk. Never even occurred to her that th' man who wanted her to carry jewels to the chapel mighta had a mean motive. And then when I asked her, I said, 'What'll it take to get you t' move on?' she tells me – Hell! She wants a proposal!" He took another uncapped swig of whiskey, the sight of which was making Victor feel ill. "Little thing gets the heart cut right out of her and thinks she'll just try again. No revenge. Half us down here want revenge. Not her. Loved so quick, and she just wanted to be loved back."

The hot-cold whiskey feel inside of Victor was turning progressively more cold. "You know she brought me back from the dead," he blurted, half-aware of what awful conversation it was but failing to find another way to say it.

"I heard," Bonejangles said. "Thought it was a story. They can do that?"

"I guess," said the young man. "She loved me. She had to. To do that, you know."

"Yeah, well, don' let it go to your head," the skeleton said dryly. "She loved everyone." With that, he drained the bottle and let it drop onto the bar top with a clatter. Victor was left staring dumbly at his hands, his stupid dying hands with their little reminder of _'twelve hours.'_ Twelve hours to live, and he was spending it drunk, which was just the way his grandfather had gone out too, if he recalled. Perhaps he was more a proper Van Dort than he sometimes felt.

_She loved everyone._ What did that mean? Even under all the whiskey, it wasn't hard to puzzle out: he wasn't special. Anyone could have opened her grave and won her heart, he was sure. He wasn't even the most deserving of it. What had he done for her, really, except break that heart again? What on _earth_ had made her save him? Love for a man she hardly knew? He wasn't even sure he'd told her his family name. One half-friendly glance on his part and she was prepared to spend eternity with him. Perhaps that was all it had taken Barkis, too, all those years ago.

Now when he thought back on Emily's face, all he could see was the pain beneath her rosy smile. It had been there the last time he saw her, when she was pressing his and Victoria's hands together at the altar. It was the look of the death of a dream, the final realization on her part that he did not love her the way she loved him. He didn't love anyone the way she loved him.

He didn't.

It hit him with a little shock, how obvious it was. Once, he thought he'd been torn between his loves for two women. Now, though, he was a husband, and very nearly a father, and just one year on his own immaturity was nearly painful to reflect on. He had not been in love at all. There might have been the seed, the flowering potential for lifelong happiness, but what more could one expect after only two days in another's company? For all the talk in books about love at first sight, he wasn't even sure at what point he'd begun truly loving Victoria, the woman to whom he was perfectly matched in nearly every way. Was it on their wedding day? The week before, when they'd taken a walk through town in the rain? Months afterward, when she'd told him they were going to have a child together? It wasn't as simple as all that, was it? And there was Emily, who had sacrificed an eternity of happiness for a man who did not, who could not, love her back. For her sacrifice, she had been given darkness, and he life, and love, and family, and more guilt than he'd ever had to bear. And perfectly in line with his more selfish tendencies, that last burden alone was almost enough to make him resent her for what she'd done.

Perhaps he ought to drink more often, if it gave him such great perspective on when he was being a prat.

He turned to Bonejangles. "I didn't love her," he said.

Bonejangles looked up at him from beneath the brim of his hat. He said, "I know," and then he rose from the bar stool to retrieve another bottle of whiskey.

* * *

The drink did go down a little smoother once you got used to it.

There wasn't a lot to talk about, it didn't seem. Before long the woman at the piano had finished her set and bowed the band back on, which thrummed up a jaunty tune that seemed to lift the melancholy in the pub. Victor made light, light conversation with those patrons who recognized him from a year past. When they asked where Emily had really gone, he told them she had happily moved on, as so many dreamed to do. When they asked him how he was doing, he only said that he was quite alright.

The time was anyone's guess. There was no sun to read, no clocks to chime behind the tap. Victor didn't truly drink that much; he couldn't, because he hadn't eaten in almost a day, and would probably kill himself faster if he partook any more. For the first time in his life, though, he was experiencing something approaching social ease. He could speak to strangers; he could accept their favors and kind words without guilt; here and there he could even manage a proper joke that didn't end in him choking on the punch line. In the Land of the Dead, surrounded by corpses, he felt as close to normal as he ever had before.

Eventually, even the string band quieted and moved to join the drinkers at their tables. It was surprising how quickly the world moved when one was just intoxicated enough not to notice all its details. The lights on the stage went out and dropped the pub into shades of green and blue, as if they were all under the sea. Victor wondered whether it was bad form to fall asleep on a bar top. He ought to have prepared better by drinking more back when he was still alive.

He caught on to a certain small noise slowly; had the band still been playing, he wouldn't have been able to hear it at all. From somewhere above the crowd's low murmur, there was a higher, yelping sound to be heard, very faint and rather far away. At first he thought it was in his own head, but as it persisted he began to pick it up from the world around, distinct and rather pained-sounding. No one else seemed to be paying it much attention. What would make a noise like that?

It somehow did not occur to him that, for his entire visit, he'd not seen Scraps within the bar.

When he finally realized what he was hearing, he stood up slowly. His dog was barking and that was concerning, but he was having a very hard time concentrating on it. He made his way through the crowd, on his feet for the first time in what might have been a couple of hours. Managing not to trip was exponentially harder even than usual. He ascended the stairs one at a time; the women who had crowded at the entrance when he arrived had since dispersed, leaving the doorway rather cold-looking. The square outside was noticeably emptier than before, the beer booth was abandoned, and Scraps could be heard from down the alley.

Victor walked as purposefully as he could toward the sound. He found the little bone dog in a dead end two minutes' slow walk from the pub, his long-gone hackles raised and a growl in his throat. "Scraps, boy, what's wrong?" he asked, crouching down to scratch him behind the ears. Scraps wagged his tail slightly but continued to growl, his eyes apparently on the alley's entrance. Victor looked up just in time to see a large rat dash out into the open, pausing to stand and stare directly at the young man. It did not move.

Victor didn't know whether rats could talk. "Hello," he said warily as Scraps gave another angry yip from behind him. He turned around to see the dog backed up in the corner with three more rats staring him down. They seemed to be crawling out of the shadows on the walls; he turned again to see at least seven blocking the exit. One made a rather menacing squeak at him.

"What the...?" he asked.

There were more rats than he could count. They were swarming around his ankles, grabbing at his trouser hems with their little hands. Scraps barked in panic and began to snap at them. Victor took a step backward and landed his foot on one of the rodents, which let out a terrible squeal and caused him to start. He jumped forward and realized that he was losing his balance. His shoulder hit the alley wall, and as he slipped downward his head did the same. It didn't hurt nearly as much as it might have, likely because he'd been drinking. Like an idiot.

It wasn't as though he'd hit that hard, but he was on the verge of falling unconscious anyway. The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was Scraps giving a mighty growl and finally bounding past the blockade, out of the alleyway, scrambling away on his short little legs. He was just glad the dog had gotten away. He didn't mind being left.

His last thought was that he probably deserved to be abandoned anyway.

* * *

**Of course, I had to do some intensive research into the effects of alcohol on the body in order to write this chapter, but it was all very scientific, I assure you. *hic***

**Just wanted to take a second to say that you guys are awesome. I put out a call for criticism in the last chapter and you responded beautifully, pointing out a few flaws I hadn't noticed but do need to fix. Super-extra-special thanks to PlayerPiano, who went above and beyond the call of duty in finding the answer to a particular question I had asked by ****_re-reading the entire fic beginning to_****_end_****, which is something I haven't even done yet and would consider a huge drag. I have the best readers in the world. Y'all are ever in Portland, I'll buy you a drink.**


	13. The Woman at the Window

**Here's unlucky chapter 13, and it seems to be living up to its name. This was a very slow and difficult section to compose; when I set my mind to it, I can usually bang out a chapter in a day, but this one took four. I still feel like the writing quality is very uneven, but after two months AFK, I'm happy enough just to see it completed. As always, if you see any specific aspect of the story or composition that could use improvement, PLEASE don't hesitate to tell me.  
**

13

She felt as though she was going mad.

There was only so long a woman could do needlework before she felt the need to smother herself with it, and Victoria had reached that threshold hours ago. In the drawing room, with her husband's brown wool jacket draped across the window sill, she took to repeatedly pacing the floor in a small circle and then sitting down again, heedless of how hysterical it must have made her look. She wanted to cry, but had the strangest feeling that if she broke down, it would mean she had somehow lost. Every person she'd ever known had promised her that love was a laughable ideal, and all she'd ever hoped for her life was to prove them wrong. Now it seemed that she was failing, utterly. Surely she hadn't been abandoned. Victor would never do such a thing.

Mrs. Hall had bidden her to eat some time past. Victoria couldn't remember refusing, but she must have, because the housekeeper did not return. In a fugue, she found minutes, full half-hours, slipping by without a thought, while over and over she rose and circled the room and sat down again. She wasn't hungry or tired or disinterested, just consumed with swallowing her painful tears, and this preoccupation carried her for so long that when the clock suddenly struck five, she felt as though she had just been dragged up from the bottom of a lake.

To feel so disassociated by panic was deeply disturbing to her. Only a year ago she'd escaped from her home in the dead of night with nothing but a quilt and a little grit, but now she had lost that charge of both her health and body. To think that, on top of it all, she had no direction over her own_ mind_ anymore was just too much.

She left the drawing room and climbed to the upstairs hallway with nothing more than a desire to take leave of herself. The powder room was empty and the bedroom unwelcomingly cold, but the small attic doorway near the end of the hall seemed to call her down. It squeaked horribly as she turned the cold handle, and the smell of dust alone was almost enough to send her into a fit of coughing, but she pursed her lips and ascended the steep, narrow stairway. It was coolly quiet between the walls, and very dark. The stairs said, _krrk, grackk, crikk._

When she stepped up onto the attic landing, there were cobwebs in her hair. The small room was scattered with boxes and bags, all cast deep blue in the thin gloaming light through the window. She and Victor hardly owned enough to furnish their home, but some of their sundry items had never found a place in the house proper. Many of the boxes were Victor's, holding collections of books and sketchings from his childhood, and one, not yet dusty, contained two infant christening gowns which Nell impressed she had bought at great expense in London. Victoria had only four items in the attic: her hope chest, a collection of clothing from her girlhood, a trunk containing her wedding dress, and a small red sewing box, which her grandmother had once used for needles and thread.

She knelt carefully on the wooden floor to draw the sewing box out from where it lay sandwiched between a child's stepstool and a very old brass kettle. The kettle fell down as she removed the box, and tipped precariously into the space between the stool and wall. The box's key was long lost, but the back hinge had also been broken for as long as she could remember, and the top unhooked from its base with a small nudge. Dusty blue light fell over its contents as she lifted away the lid.

There they were. A book, a blanket, a little marble ball. She sighed as she drew out _Tanglewood Tales for Boys and Girls_ and held it in her trembling hands. Dust motes drifted above the cover through her misting breath. Past the date of publication was the title page with an illustration of five children gathered in a lush garden to hear their governess's stories. It was her favorite part of the book. When Victoria was young she'd hoped that she'd find such friends and such a secret garden to call her own, but it never happened. She always read alone.

_"The Minotaur"… "The Dragon's Teeth"… "Circe's Palace"… _

How long it had been since she'd seen this book. How long it had been since she'd felt so sad.

She cleared her sore throat and reached back into the box to withdraw the little cotton blanket that had been hers for longer than she could remember. The marble rolled off of the fabric as it moved and hummed lightly against the velvet lining. The blanket was yellowed with age, but when she pressed it to her face, she could still smell on it the heady aromas of talc and flowers and nursery fragrances she'd forgotten she'd ever known. They brought to mind thoughts of beautiful summer windows and sheer curtains blowing in the breeze. She breathed as deeply as she could and tried to hold on to the image, but it was gone before she was entirely sure whether it had been a daydream or a memory.

As she drew away, the cool attic air seemed to press down on her shoulders like a mantle. She swallowed slightly and then turned to cough, pressing the cloth blanket gently to her mouth. When she pulled it away, she saw that blood was left on the fabric. A little penny-sized black spot stained the corner to which she'd pressed to her lips. That was it. Fifteen years it had been tucked away from harm, and now in seconds she had ruined it. She stared at the black dash and found her vision suddenly swimming. She held the bloodstain to her chest and squeezed her eyes shut as a tear fell down her nose.

When Victoria was a little girl, she'd had the idea that if she could capture and preserve as many items of sentiment as possible, she would never be able to forget the moments of happiness they'd brought to her. She'd gathered her first favorite book in that empty sewing box, and the small pink marble which she'd once thought was the most beautiful thing she owned, and the thin blanket that Hildegard had swaddled her in as baby. She never told her mother or father about that box; even as a small child, she'd known that her parents strongly disapproved of such romanticism. At the time she'd thought it was because proper adults grow up and understand that passion has no place in life; now, she didn't know what to think.

Now, she was kneeling in the middle of a dust-filled attic with a small sewing box in her hands, and finding that, after all, the miscellanies of a simpler time in her life were not retainers of happiness, but of a deep and profound sense of loss. The black on the child's blanket seemed chillingly emblematic.

_What would Victor think of me?_ she thought as she fought back her tears_._

_I am afraid to die._

"But everything will be alright," said a voice from the window.

Victoria gave a watery gasp as she looked up to where a shadow had fallen at her knees. Her vision was wet and the air thick and blue with dust, but she could clearly see a woman's dark shape seated on the hope chest by the window, staring out into the evening sky with her back to the room. Victoria felt a thrill run down her back.

"It's you," she whispered.

"It's me," the woman said. Her smile was audible. "I'm sorry. We never really made it to speaking terms, did we? I hate to intrude."

Victoria only shook her head. "I'm hallucinating," she said aloud, pressing a palm to her jaw.

"Well, yes," the woman said, turning slightly from the window. Her hair was long and her skin was very pale. "But I hope that won't make you disinclined to stay."

There was nothing Victoria seemed to be able to say to that. She looked back down to the stained blanket and used it to dab at her cheeks. How strange that, in the midst of grief, her fevered mind should invoke the woman she had almost lost the love of her life to. She bore the corpse bride no ill will, but neither did she feel particularly close to her. As she said, they'd never truly spoken. After a minute she managed to say, "I'm sure you know that - nothing's been the same, since we met you." She sniffed lightly. "My great-aunt Gertrude passed in May, and all through the service I only wanted to smile for her. She must be… very happy now." She kept her eyes cast down, half afraid to look up. It was easier if she pretended that the room was empty.

"There's nothing to be afraid of at all, but I'm not ready to die," she admitted after a moment. "I imagine that i-it hurts quite a lot." Strange, how her husband's affectations seemed to wear off on her. She'd never been prone to stuttering.

"Well, that depends on the death," Emily said from the window, her voice rather low.

"Oh," Victoria murmured. "I'm so sorry. I don't mean to be insensitive."

Emily laughed delightedly and turned to look over her shoulder. "Oh, dearest. I remember being one of the well-bred and meek, but you don't have to apologize to me." Her voice softened. "Dying is always hard, but there's no reason to dwell on it. You're not dead yet."

"I'm alone," Victoria whispered. "Please tell me, where has Victor gone?"

Emily turned slightly from the window. Victoria could see the curves of her face limned in the dusk. She continued, saying, "He's gone Down- under the ground, hasn't he?" She pressed the blanket against her bosom. "He's gone." _He decided he made the wrong choice._

"Oh, don't be rash," said the woman at the window with an arch in her voice. "It would be nothing short of a blessing for anyone to be loved half as much as he loves you."

"How could you possibly know that?" Victoria could nearly feel her heart breaking, to think of her marriage being predicated on a lie of love. "Where has he gone?"

"He's coming back," Emily said with a very strange quality. "I promise."

"But where is he?" Victoria repeated. She rose to her feet slowly, half to see if the specter would disappear if she moved. It did not. She was starting to feel uncharacteristically angry. "Why would he go? Why has he done this to me? Why would he leave our -"

She didn't have the chance to finish before she was startled by the sound of the attic door squeaking open at the base of the stairs. "Miss Victoria?" Mrs. Hall's muted voice carried up the stairwell. Victoria looked up to Emily, who had turned fully at the noise. Her face was still blackened with shadows.

"I have to go," she said, and looked up to meet Victoria's eyes. "I'm sorry, dearest. I don't mean to come off as secretive. It's hard to see everything clearly when you're so very far away from it all."

"I don't understand," Victoria said as the stairs began to creak with the housekeeper's approach. She turned toward them and pursed her lips before looking back. "Please -"

But the hope chest was quite deserted. The woman at the window had gone as suddenly as she'd come, and twilight was left to drift across Victoria's skirt hems like an apology.

* * *

Agnes Hall was not a woman who took kindly to inactivity. Before she died, her mother had raised her to take pride in every moment she spent working and able, and that sense of gratification, she was pleased to say, had always served her well. As a child she'd cared for her father, and then her brother, and when they were both gone she'd left home and come into employ with a rich old widower who paid handsomely for nothing more than having someone at hand to brew tea and dust bookshelves. Even as a girl of fifteen she'd been unable to imagine taking so much for so little, and had spent the next three years drawing baths and cooking meals and listening to him talk about his life, which made him happier than any of her other services. At the end, she was even the one to arrange the funeral while his children bickered over their inheritances. His was only the first of many households she would work in, but the experience had taught her a valuable lesson: bad things never come from doing a little more than one is asked.

Her insatiable drive to stay occupied was causing her a great amount of distress this evening, however, because for nearly the first time in her life, she had the distinct feeling that she was not needed. No supper had been prepared that evening; after refusing lunch, the younger Mrs. Van Dort had not made any further mention of food, and Agnes intuited that it would have been heavy-handed to ask. The last time she'd seen the young woman, she had been pacing endlessly through the drawing room. Such frenetic activity was no good for a lady in poor health. Agnes had wanted to instruct her to sit down or retire to bed, but she knew her suggestions would be ignored. The poor girl was working herself half into a frenzy as only a young woman in love could.

_Such a shame,_ she thought as she idly swept the kitchen. Agnes had learned from experience that any father who would abandon his family was worth no more than his own gray basin water, but there was no chance of convincing Victoria of the same. She'd likely pine away until her husband returned, as the young were taught to these days. What an impossibly sad thought. Agnes shook her head as she turned around to clean beneath the stove. From far away in the house, a high creak echoed down the stairs, and in the corner of her eye, a small streak of brown made a quick dash across the floor toward the cupboard.

_Rat!_

Agnes let out a sharp breath of revulsion as she stamped on the tiled kitchen floor and beat at the air before her with her broom, but the little animal had already crawled back into the woodwork. The filthy creatures were becoming a problem; she may not have been a high-class woman, but she knew better than to cook in a kitchen shared with any creature smaller than a sugar bowl. Her brother had been bitten by a rat once in the little home their father kept in the country, and he had nearly died. She held no fondness for the animals. With a huff, she placed the broom behind the door and exited the cold kitchen with her hands in her apron pockets. The stove could wait if it meant not coming down with rat-bite fever.

In the entrance hall, she raised her eyes to the ceiling. She and her employers both knew that the Van Dorts owned much too large a home for their purposes. It was drafty most of the year and too ornate to suit the young couple's tastes, but far be it from the well-to-do to allow their offspring to live modestly, she supposed. The wooden floor of the entrance hall squeaked beneath Agnes's feet. It needed a scrub, though she'd been putting off the task for her knees' sakes. The highest corners of the ceiling were also beginning to show signs of cobwebs; it just seemed such a pointlessly dangerous task to undertake, when they were so often invisible in the hall which only had its candelabra lit perhaps once in a month, when someone of pomp or import came to call. In June the Van Dorts had been involuntary hosts to a baronet and his wife, old friends of the Everglot family. She recalled that Mister Van Dort had graciously offered them the master room, thoughtless to the fact that a Lady would expect her own sleeping quarters. After some blustering on the part of a mortified husband and wife, Victoria's bedroom was extended as well, and she ended up spending three unceremonious nights in the nursery. Victor, in turn, had been forced to sleep in his study.

Agnes didn't pretend to understand the high-class and well-bred. At the time it had been a hellacious unpleasant arrangement for all involved, but looking back, she was vindictively glad that she had been there to see it, because the thought of her employer passed out over a desk for half a week was the last salve she had for her anger toward him. He'd always seemed a gentle young man, but there was no excuse for having fled his home to avoid coming down ill. From the stories she'd heard, it wouldn't have been the first time he'd pulled a disappearing act, either.

She would have to remember to throttle him if he ever showed back on the doorstep. It was unchristian of her to want to, but she'd never been as devout as her mother would have liked. And as her father had been known to say and frequently act out - sometimes a bit of righteous anger got the job done a lot quicker than a turning of the cheek.

Victoria was no longer in the drawing room.

Agnes was certain of this even before she had approached the door, because there were no footsteps to be heard from within. She hesitated to listen before turning the knob, and just as she expected, when she did walk in it was to an empty room. The young woman's sewing basket was open on the end table, and one of her needles had fallen to the ground before the chair. Victoria was normally much more meticulous than to allow that. The clock on the mantle read only a quarter past five. It felt as though it should have been much later.

She stepped back out of the drawing room after putting the needle and sewing away, and as she did, a second muffled shrill could be heard from the upstairs hallway. She stopped at the base of the stairs to listen; after a second, it sounded again, much quieter this time. It would never do if a window had been left open in this weather, so she climbed the stairs to find the source of the noise.

When she reached the upstairs landing, a further _skrrk_ led her down the hall to the cracked attic door at the end, which every few seconds was being pulled to and fro by a draft from above. What a waste of warmth. Agnes was about to close the door when she heard a voice drifting down the dark stairs.

"…could you possibly know that?" Victoria was speaking, and she sounded very upset. "Where has he gone?"

The poor girl was talking to herself. The housekeeper pursed her lips and tried to decide whether she should leave her employer in peace or offer company. She was not a sentimental woman, but Agnes felt fondly for the girl, who seemed unfailingly sweet and gracious. Far be it from her to pass judgment on nobility, but it was nearly a miracle that such a flower could have come from the Everglots.

"But where is he?" Victoria spoke again, sounding closer to the verge of tears. "Why would he go? Why has he done this to me? Why would he leave our -" It was dreadful to hear. Agnes hesitated a moment before opening the door fully and calling up the stairs.

"Miss Victoria?"

The speaking stopped. Agnes began to climb, pushing cobwebs away from her face and taking note that an attic cleaning would make for fine busywork the next time she needed some. "I don't understand," Victoria could be heard to say quietly as the older woman approached the landing. "Please -"

Agnes entered the low room. Expectedly, there was no one there but Victoria, standing in the center of the floor and staring toward the window. The older woman established herself behind a dusty trunk and said again, "Miss Victoria?"

Victoria swallowed. "Yes. Yes? Is something the matter?" she asked, turning around. Her eyes were dry, but her face was trapped in a deep frown.

"Not if you don't think so," said Agnes. "May I ask who were you speaking to?"

Victoria looked back to the window, a lone figure in a field of antiques and memories. "No one at all," she said after a minute. "I'm sorry." Agnes heard a light sniff and then she turned around again. "I think perhaps I might like to take tea. If it's not too late."

"Not at all," Agnes said. "Biscuits?"

"If you please," the young woman said with a wan smile. She dropped carefully to her knees to gather a few small items into a lock-box. Agnes tutted and stepped forward.

"No need, no need. I'll take care of it." As she bent down to gather an old children's book from the ground, though, there was a small rustle from beneath the stepstool against the wall. A large and sleepy-looking rat stuck its nose out into the air, and when Victoria saw it, she screamed. Agnes jumped in fright at the noise, and so did the rat.

It disappeared back under the stepstool like a flash, knocking against the boxes as it fled. An old brass kettle which sat atop the stool was knocked backward into a gap next to the wall, and with a muffled clank, a large cloud of dust was driven into the air. Victoria was sent to coughing almost instantly. Agnes kicked sharply at a box that she hoped the rat was hiding behind before kneeling down next to the young woman.

Seconds passed, but the coughing did not stop. The deep and scratchy resonance in her chest sounded far worse than it had before. The poor girl hardly looked able to breathe, and there was nothing Agnes could do for it but open the attic window to try and clear the dust. The hope chest nearby had a clear spot in its grimy coating, where someone appeared to have been seated recently. Agnes turned to Victoria and watched the girl's face as she coughed into her hand; she looked very much in pain, and there was blood on her fingers.

The older woman had taken only a step toward the stairs to fetch the laudanum when Victoria suddenly gave a strangled cry and began to moan. With a chill, Agnes returned to her side to see her clutching at her belly, still gasping for breath with tears in her eyes.

"Victoria?" she asked, taking her by the shoulders and abandoning the formalities of address. "Victoria, what's happened?"

The young woman shook her head, but Agnes had worked for a midwife for a year when she was twenty-five years old and knew more about childbirth than she had ever been comfortable with. "Can you stand?" she asked Victoria. The young woman did not respond.

"Alright, that's enough," Agnes said. "Don't move. I'm going for help." Her trip down the stairs was quicker than she could remember moving in ten years. When she exited the house with her scarf and hat in hand, night had nearly fallen. She took off walking toward the center of town without the carriage, though she knew her lone figure would draw eyes along the street.

If she was lucky, Doctor MacGregor might still be at his practice. Hopefully he could run as fast as she could, because the baby was coming, and there was no time at all to waste.

* * *

**Lastly, I wanted to take a moment to point out that, in case anybody hasn't noticed, our own No Name Please39 has finally started posting stories on the site, and I strongly encourage any and all Doctor Who fans out there to drop by and give 'em a read. She's as formidable a writer as she is a reviewer and deserves your attention for it. :)**


	14. The Swarm in the Shadows

14

Far preceding his return to consciousness, Victor was plagued in sleep by the feeling that something was terribly wrong and he was to blame. He dreamed that his home was on fire, and then that his father was dead, and no matter how desperately he tried to dig into the ground to find his way Downstairs and apologize, the hole never grew larger. Every shadow in his mind was a menacing black tree, and every movement a monster in the branches.

_I'm sorry,_ he thought as he stared at his hands, which had begun to peel in front of his eyes. _I am so sorry._

The loathsome fear did not disperse as he woke, slowly, but instead settled heavy in his bones. It was initially hard to discern awareness from unconscious, because the world was such a confusing patchwork of light and dark. His eyes hurt horribly when he tried to open them, and he felt as though he'd been thwacked over the head with a cane. He reached out blindly and found what felt like a bed's lip beneath him, which was strange. He was fairly certain he'd been nowhere near a bed when… he…

What had happened?

With a pained groan Victor lifted himself up and opened his eyes. He was indeed lying on a bed of some sort, but it didn't seem to be for his comfort. The sheets were stained gray with age and the frame so rusted that he feared it might collapse if he moved. The room was dark and only half-papered, with patchy wooden floors and slatted walls through which dusty green light drifted like dying sunbeams. A hole in the ceiling above the bed sadly spotlighted his little patch of the room.

This certainly wasn't the same place he'd fallen asleep in, if "falling asleep" was the right phrase. Actually, the more he thought about it, the more he seemed to recall. The last images in his mind were of a dim pub, and an alley wall, and… and…

Oh, rats.

They were starting to eke from the shadows. It wasn't obvious yet, but they were near – a tail here, a shiny eye there, and beneath them the bated breath of a colony waiting for its object of intent to stir. Victor stared, dismayed, into the black corners of the room where their little shapes manifested and then shrunk away again, malevolent and shrewd.

He was surrounded. And then, the final horror – a voice sounding from the furthest wall, and the form of a man stepping out into the grotesque light.

"You're quite a heavy sleeper," drawled a chillingly familiar voice. "I thought a gentleman of your delicate constitution would have woken a long time ago."

Victor stared agape toward the man in the center of the room. Lord Barkis Bittern cut a striking figure for all the most perverse reasons. He was as tall and broad as ever, but he moved with a staggering limp. His fine suit was ragged and chewed, and one shoulder hung much lower than the other. Most ghastly was his face. The right half was as calculatedly malicious as it had ever been, but the left looked as though it had been twisted and pinched off. The corner of his mouth grimaced upward and the blue skin around the eye socket was sloughing down.

On his high shoulder sat an enormous brown rat, staring at Victor intently. He saw it and looked away with a shudder. The dead man gave a soft laugh.

"Why, Benjamin, he doesn't like you," he said, tickling the cat-sized rodent under the chin. Its gaze did not waver. "How rude."

"W-where am I?" Victor asked, sitting up fully and backing up against the wall. "How long has it…?" He raised his hands before his face. Blue skin, dead skin. He had been asleep for a very long time.

As he lowered his arms in horror, Barkis started speaking. "Such a long time since we've seen each other," he said, turning and stepping toward the wall where light entered through a slat. "Such a long time since I died. While they cut up my body before my very eyes, I thought at least I'd have the small comfort of knowing you'd be here when I arrived. And yet, you weren't."

"What d-do you want?" Victor asked, carefully placing his feet on the ground. The shadows seemed to swell with excitement as he moved, and every time Barkis turned, the rat on his shoulder changed position to keep its steady gaze on the young man. It never blinked.

"I killed you," Barkis said rather conversationally, still staring out the hole in the wall. Then he turned on his heel with a sharp twist. His low arm swung loosely and from the corners of the room rolled a low and eager chittering. "And I want to know why you're not dead." Victor opened his mouth but didn't answer, and Barkis's twisted smile grew wider.

"Death is really quite dreary, you know," he said, taking another step forward. His right foot dragged heavily behind as he moved. "Life was much preferable. Maybe if I kill you, you'll show us your little trick." As he spoke, he lifted his mismatched arms and the shadows came alive with squirming, twitching noses, pressing out into the light. Victor started and raised his feet away from the ground again, while Barkis stroked the big rat behind the ears. "It's a wonder you were stupid enough to come back down here. Did you think I'd forget? Forgive and move on, like the rest of those imbeciles?" There was a growling undertone in his smooth voice, sounding more gleeful with every word. _"Never._ I can always wait. Everybody dies."

Victor was sick and sore and very scared. He didn't know how he'd gotten here and he didn't know how close he was to dying. He'd failed his wife and he'd failed his child and he had _always _been a disappointment to his parents. Now he didn't know how he was going to save himself, and perhaps it no longer mattered if he did. "N-nothing," he said trying to keep all of himself out of the spreading black. "I didn't do anything. I shouldn't have come back at all."

"But you did," the mad corpse said, drawing a step closer. "You, weak little thing without a greater dream than – what was it? – _love_. To _love._ _I_ had a dream!" he barked suddenly, causing Victor to start and the bed to creak dangerously. _"I_ knew a life well-spent! Not like you weak mewling things, men and boys without the will to take what they want!"

"You killed people," Victor said, standing unsteadily while the shadows writhed. "You killed women on their wedding nights. You took _life."_

"Among other things," Barkis said. His disfigured face left him permanently smirking. "My father taught me to look for the value in everything, so I took everything they were worth. What do you think your dear,_ sweet_ Victoria was worth to me after the money was gone?" Victor's heart quickened. "That's why I love brides. They always have more to give."

The rat called Benjamin licked his lips.

"N-no," Victor said, backing away from the dead man and running into the bed. "Whatever you want, I c-can't give it to you."

"Whatever I want?" hissed Barkis, drawing further nearer. "No, you certainly can't. I want my wife. I want my _conquest._ I want the eternal damnation of every one of those carcasses who tore me apart. I want my life back and I want you dead. Now," he said wickedly, reaching beneath his coat and withdrawing a very sharp, very vicious-looking knife, "which one of those things is within my immediate grasp?"

Victor stared for just an instant at the blade. He had never been very fast, so it was quite a marvel that he had time to dodge as it was suddenly thrust at his chest.

The tall young man stumbled away as Barkis's knife buried itself in the ugly gray mattress before him. With a groan, the bedframe finally buckled and toppled sideways, taking the blade with it. Victor pressed his back to the uneven wall behind him and instantly found a wormy tail curling around his neck and little paws in his hair. A white rat with pink eyes jumped onto his shoulder and began to grind its teeth. With a cry of horror, he swept it away and turned from the wall, as Barkis cursed and spat, trying to retrieve his blade from beneath the collapsed bed.

Rats were beginning to pour out of the black. Brown and gray and dark as pitch, they swarmed over each other, squealing and clawing to reach him. Benjamin had left Barkis's shoulder and landed on what was left of the bed. Still without letting Victor leave his view, he started up a mighty racket, clicking and cracking, his big black eyes nearly bulging out of his head. The colony responded in turn, and the noise of them was so mighty that Victor felt almost quailed from moving. Barkis had found his knife, and standing among his writhing army, he looked enormous.

"I – WILL – KILL YOU!" he screamed lunging forward again at Victor. "And _then,"_ he said, grabbing the young man's shirtcollar and pressing the blade to his breast, "oh, then, the real fun begins."

Two things happened at once then. With a flutter of wings, an enormous raven swept through the hole in the roof and cried "Quooo!" as it grazed the heads of the swarm. "What -" Barkis said, letting Victor go and turning in confusion. At the sight of wingshadows, the rats sent up a mighty cry and ran for cover, and Victor saw a small flash of white barrel past his knees into the midst of the horde.

"Scraps!" he cried. The little bone dog gave a yip and snatched a rodent to worry in his jaws, as every rat terrier was born to do. The raven gave another scream and cuffed Barkis around the back of the head before sweeping past Victor and disappearing into the shadows on the far wall. There, for the first time, he could see the empty shape of a doorway.

The dead man was raving and Scraps was being swarmed. Victor gave a desperate glance backwards and ran for the exit. In the narrow hallway's slotted light, he could see the raven's black form swimming through the darkness before him. Someone was coming up behind. A thousand tiny feet were following him through the door and if he didn't move, he would be caught in the flood. There were holes in the floorboards and spongy spots beneath his feet, leaving him to stumble and trip in the darkness. He couldn't see.

"GET HIM!" Barkis cried, from what seemed like very far away in the labyrinthine building…

And then, as his shoulder slammed into an unsound wall, the rotting wood splintered open and he fell through it onto a cobbled alleyway. He coughed at the dust blooming out from the building and struggled back to his feet. The raven soared out of the exit behind him and took off over the rooftops.

Victor took two steps and then doubled over coughing again. Behind him sounded a kerfuffle in the building, and then Scraps, too, burst out of the wall at breakneck speed. He was draped in cobwebs and his bones were stained brown with dirt. The little dog was panting heavily, but would not slow down. He ran a few rings around his master to see if he was alright, and when Victor stood again, gave a bark and bolted down the street in the same direction in which the raven had gone. Victor followed as fast as his lungs would allow. Only once did he glance behind at the shack he'd escaped from. It was cast in the shadow of a much larger building, and even as he watched, seemed to bulge and squirm with the movements of a thrashing hive.

* * *

**I have been pretty outspoken in the past about my opposition to exploring sexual themes in ****_Corpse Bride._**** With very few exceptions, it is gratuitous and unnecessary. However, I do find Barkis an extremely fascinating character for being the only part of the original story to nearly broach those subjects. His motivations for killing were never clearly established, but he certainly had a thing for virginal young women. He doesn't strike me as the sort to let any part of a good catch "go to waste." Half of me wanted to delve into it more explicitly in this chapter, but the other half said anything more than a gentle hint would be in bad taste. I do appreciate others' thoughts on the matter, because your yea or nay may influence my decision on certain points in the future.  
**

**As a real-life rat lover, this was a sad chapter to write. Fun fact: Rats grinding their teeth means they're happy! Victor should have taken that white one home, because it just liked him! :3**

**I will buy a sundae* for anyone who recognizes the obscure horror film reference in this chapter.**

***imaginary sundae**


	15. Handsome in Blue

**I have been having a problem recently with the chapters in this story being posted incorrectly. I have a habit of compulsively reposting chapters to fix small mistakes, but the documents I select for replacement are somehow getting mixed up with chapters from other stories sitting in my doc manager. This has happened no fewer than five times so far, so if anybody sees it again, PLEASE let me know. It is highly, highly irritating and I want to fix it as quickly as possible.**

**Maximum recognition to No Name Please39 for beta-ing, and being very frank about where I done screwed up.**

15

How long he ran for, he couldn't have said. His chest hurt horribly and his legs were not built for such sustained movement, but Victor followed Scraps down alleyways and between buildings for what felt like aeons. The homes they passed looked deserted, and the businesses equally long abandoned. No one was out on the street; the Land of the Dead seemed a ghost town.

Even the dog was beginning to slacken his pace as they ran. Scraps' little white feet pattered the ground more slowly with every few steps, and his tail was drooping. They rounded a corner together and Victor grasped the edge of the building as his dog finally came to a halt and dropped to a sitting position so heavily that the tip of his tail clacked off and rolled into a crack between the cobblestones.

Victor scooped down to pick up the vertebra before collapsing on the ground himself. "Good boy," he gasped, leaning up against the brick wall and keeling over his knees. He hadn't realized that he was shaking so badly. Scraps flopped down and laid his head on his master's lap, wagging his broken tail tiredly. Victor placed the errant bone back in place as gently as he could. "Good boy."

For a while they simply sat in the gutter together, breathing deeply and listening for pursuers. Victor's head was thumping like a drum, but he dared not close his eyes. A year. Only a year since the incident in the church and it hadn't even occurred to him that someone might be waiting for him Downstairs with less than friendly intentions. Mark another way in which he was the greatest fool ever born. He placed his head in his shaking hands. Everything had happened so quickly that part of him envisaged his escape from the building as only a daring fantasy. Perhaps he was really still sitting in the dark with a murderer, being taunted with the ways that both he and the woman he loved could be broken and hurt.

_"What do you think she was worth to me after the money was gone?"_ He heard the whispered taunt in his ear again, and its unspoken continuation: _"What do you think she would be worth to me now?"_ The tremors increased and he took a deep breath to clear his mind of the thought.

He could never, ever let Victoria die.

He tried to imagine the two of them in a world where none of this had ever happened. They stood still and gray together in a ferrotype, dressed their finest with a girl or boy between them. Perhaps a son, forced by his grandmother into a sailor suit not unlike one Victor had once had to endure, or a daughter with golden banana curls. It was a shock when he realized that he was imagining the little skeleton children as his own. Abruptly, the only image he could conjure of his child's face anymore was that of a grinning skull. Perhaps it was the poison twisting his mind into a procession of horrible thoughts, but whatever was causing them, they seemed inescapable. The young man covered his eyes.

He had a hard time believing that they might have actually evaded Barkis and the rats, but as long as he listened, there was still no sound of pursuit in the streets. There was no sound at all, in fact, save for water dripping slowly from a rusty bucket in an abandoned cart on the far side of the road. The dead did seem prone to not finishing the things they started. Few lamps were lit along the road here; this entire quarter of town seemed quite forsaken. Victor leaned against the wall and raised his hands above his head in the dim light. Blue and dead. Scraps licked tonguelessly at his elbow as he rolled up his shirtsleeves. The skin was cold, as far as the eye could see. When he touched the ground, or his own skin, all sensation seemed somehow muted, as though felt through a thick piece of cloth.

For a moment he dropped his chin and looked at the ground between his knees. Then he patted his dog gently on the skull and told him, "I'm going to die." It didn't seem much of a question anymore. "But at least we'll be together again." The little canine writhed with happiness on the ground and let out a whine. Victor couldn't help but smile.

He lifted Scraps' chin gently and turned his head to each side. Apart from the dust and cobwebs stuck to his ribs, he looked a bit _chewed_ on – little tooth marks peppered his skeleton, and in a couple of spots the bone had splintered under the force of a crushing bite. Guilt jabbed at his throat as he drew the dog, who was acting none the worse for wear, into his lap. "I'm sorry, boy," he murmured as the little animal pressed his paws excitedly against his chest. It was his fault his pet was hurt – or as hurt as a corpse could be. Why did he seem to engender such loyalty from the dead?

"Would you still love me if I were the biggest idiot in the world?" he asked, rubbing Scraps' spine. The dog smiled at him, panting a little. "Of course you would," he said. "You're a dog." He placed his head against the brick wall behind him and stared upward into the sky. This was it, he realized. This was the view he had to look forward to for the rest of eternity. No sun and no clouds, ever again – only green mists drifting overhead, lingering with the firmament's faint purple glow.

It was actually rather beautiful.

The Land of the Dead was such a big place. Everyone who ever lived would someday find it their home, but still so much of it was empty. City blocks, perhaps full miles, stood here vacant as open graves, waiting for someone to fill their doorways. How many were ever allowed to leave? Would he ever be, when he was dead?

Maybe the city just went on forever, shambling and stretching to the sky. Perhaps it would make a pleasant adventure, someday, to take off toward the horizon and see where he ended up. Maybe there were towns beneath America, or the African jungle, and black oceans in between. Imagine walking forever and never feeling tired or hungry, or even sore of foot. Never needing to stop for breath. When he was dead and no longer needed to rest, it could be a journey of purest curiosity and discovery, like those of the explorers of old.

There was an entire new world to discover, and all of eternity to see it.

He'd thought much the same when he'd agreed to marry Emily, and now the feeling was creeping back. Somehow, separation from the Land of the Living seemed to make his mind much clearer. Maybe death was no end at all, but the beginning of something wonderful. The Elder had said that the afterlife was a mere shadow of existence, shallow and stagnant, but how could it be so bad? It was the end of change and surprise. It was the end of pain, which was all that humanity throughout time had ever really wanted. What a thought, that mankind's greatest fear was truly what it had been searching for all along!

He took a deep breath. Might as well enjoy the experience of breathing while it lasted. How long would it take for him to remember it as just another unnecessary chore of the living?

Victor patted Scraps gently on the head and stood up. His legs shook a bit, but somehow it was more tolerable knowing that he wouldn't have to deal with it much longer. He took a look down the alley in both directions and picked one, hopeful that it would pay off. The twisting and turning roads ran between the buildings with disordered intent, and sometimes the tall structures above him would block out the sky entirely as he walked. Scraps followed closely on his heels, watching his master's face.

"Arff?" he seemed to ask.

"I'm alright," Victor said down to the dog with an uncertain smile. If he wasn't already, he was going to be.

Perhaps all roads did lead back to the center of town. The buildings gradually grew spindlier and wider-spaced as he walked, and more and more streetlights appeared to guide him along the path. When he looked to the left, there was the teller's office he'd visited when he first arrived, quite dark and very quiet. He was even beginning to halfway recognize the street names he passed. Horrible, all, but sort of charming, in a way. 'Lacerated Spleen Street' looked markedly familiar.

And there he was. He passed beneath a sagging banner which read _"0 days till Hallowe'en!"_and into Blackbowels' Square again, where there was no one at all to be seen. Beer booths sat abandoned and the remnants of a party were left in scattered mess across the ground. Even the skeleton horse looked a bit down, shaking its head and pawing dejectedly at the ground.

The only sound seemed to be coming from the pub entrance. From inside drifted faint laughter and the dim glow of lights. Victor entered the building through its lower door and found a small group inside, talking rather quietly to one another. A few skeletons sat at a table by the wall, and a small commotion was sounding from behind the kitchen doors. The only other resident of the room was, of all people, the Elder Gutknecht. The old skeleton sat alone at a pockmarked wooden table with a raven clinging to his crooked spine. He looked to be speaking to it. Victor approached them with apprehension. "Hello," he said, unsure whether the mood in the pub was appropriate for a smile, however insincere.

"Ah, it's you!" the Elder said as he turned slowly on his cane. "My boy, I wasn't sure I was going to see you alive again."

Victor started to pull out a chair. "I'm sorry to worry you," he mumbled, feeling stupid and useless.

"What was that, my boy?" the Elder asked, pressing a hand to his nonexistent ear.

"I'm sorry," Victor said again, unable to meet his eyes out of shame and opting to tug listlessly at his shirtcollar instead. "I'm an idiot. A fool. I shouldn't have left the tower." He placed his forehead against his fist and stared intently at the little green candle in the center of the table. The raven gave a squawk and hopped from the Elder's spine onto his bony shoulder, where he gave it a small stroke beneath the chin.

"Now, Huginn just flew in. She was telling me you had a spot of trouble with your wife's first husband?"

Victor looked up in confusion, and then surprise. "I – that was you?" he asked the raven, feeling a bit stupid for talking to a bird. It fixed him with a beady eye and Scraps barked at it, as if in recognition. "I'm sorry. Yes. I did have a bit of… t-trouble."

"Nasty affair," the Elder said. "No one need be consorting with rats. Unnerving little creatures."

"I'll say," Victor said, slumping slowly in his seat. There was a hard creak from behind the bar. Miss Plum had emerged from a storage closet, carrying a stack of crates so high that only the top of her skinny hat could be seen.

"Ursula," the Elder said in recognition as she passed their table.

"Elder," she responded with a sideways nod. Then, "Victor!" she said with surprise, stopping and setting the crates at her feet with a huff. "Well, would you lookit that! We'd been wondering where you… oh, dear." Her tone changed drastically as her eyes landed on his face.

"Sorry?" Victor said, self-consciously placing a hand on his cheek.

"No need to worry him, now," the Elder said evenly. "Boy's had quite a night."

This did not comfort Victor at all. "What's wrong?" he asked again, looking about for a mirror. He stood up to approach the gray glass behind the bar.

"S' nothin' love," Miss Plum said, waving a hand and acting a little flustered. "Surprised me, is all." Victor stared at his reflection across the bartop. "You look like you've got a foot in the grave."

She was right; he looked like mortality itself. His face seemed even thinner than usual, and was quite blue. Not the deep blue of the dead, but certainly sunken-looking enough to pass. He turned away with a very numb feeling. He should have expected this, but it was chilling to see nonetheless. What a strange vision into the future; he was looking at his own death mask.

Miss Plum patted him on the elbow and said kindly, "If it's any comfort, dear, you look very handsome in blue."

"T-thank you." That was a lie. He wasn't thankful at all. For a moment, he stared blankly at the earthen floor in horror, and then decided that there was nothing to be gained from dwelling on it. He looked up and scanned the pub desperately for distraction from horrible thoughts. "What's happened to everyone?"

"It's Hallowe'en," Miss Plum said, buffing her bony elbow across the already-clean counter. "People got business to take care of."

Victor started to ask, "What sort of -?" but was interrupted by the kitchen doors banging open and Bonejangles emerging from the back room with a roar of laughter. He swayed drunkenly as he walked. The hoop-skirted singer was swept up in his arms; he sang and spun in dizzy circles while she cackled and wrapped her arms around his neck. They reached the bar and he dropped her somewhat unceremoniously, leaning across the countertop for a bottle. Miss Plum slapped his hand away.

"Not this again," he grumbled as he withdrew. The singer giggled and slumped against him on the bar. "Vic!" he roared when he saw the young man. Then he stopped, tilting his head so his eyeball changed sides with a little rattle. "You look bad. Ya dead?"

No point in contesting it anymore. "Just about," he said sadly.

"Shame," said the skeleton.

"Poor handsome thing like you?" the singer asked. "Real shame. You leavin' a lady behind or followin' one down?"

"Um," he said. "I'm really not sure." What an incredibly sad thought. "Maybe both."

"Poor dear," the singer cooed. Bonejangles wrapped her up around her waist and growled happily, and she dissolved back into laughter. The Elder shook his head as the couple moved away and dropped into spoken whispers.

"I'm sorry, my boy," he said, approaching to stand at the bar next to the young man. "I kept reading after you left. There was nothing to find."

"It's alright," Victor said. Scraps was pawing a little at his ankle. "I – dying happens to everyone, doesn't it?" he asked, his heart screaming in protest.

"It does," said the Elder. "But where would humankind be if they were too complacent to that?"

Victor said, "Better off, I suppose. Fewer wars."

"You underestimate human nature. You of all people should know that hate can live far longer than people do." The raven quorked, and the memory of Barkis in the dark room surfaced in Victor's mind again. "Don't let yourself desire death, no matter how comforting it is. When you do that, you lose the will to fight for anything better. And there are things better than this, I promise you." His gesture indicated the pub, but his tone spoke of the world itself.

Victor was not reassured. His eyes drifted slowly across the room, where the lights were low and the air a sad flavor of genial. The skeletons by the wall were sharing a muted toast, clacking together their glasses and drinking in silence, as if at a wake. The earthen floor and ceiling seemed very heavy, threatening to press them all deeper into the earth. It was lonesome, and it was forever. He wasn't sure that it was what he wanted, but it was all there was. He could live with that. He deserved nothing better.

And what about Victoria? Someday he might bring her here and show her the places and friends he already felt like he'd known for a very long time. He thought of the imaginary photograph again, of the two of them and a child in black-and-white, perhaps with a familiar dog curled at their feet. What difference did it make, in that happy scene, whether their flesh was warm or cold? Why did it matter if it was a skeleton or living child's face peeking from beneath a small sailor hat? They would still be together, and they could be a family. He didn't _need _to fight anymore, for any of them. Death was only life without hurt.

But he was thinking as inconsiderately as any man could, and an unspeaking part of his mind knew that none of it was true. It didn't matter whether he found peace with eternity underground or not; he had no right to transfer that decision to the woman he loved. He thought of Victoria's face, and her eyes, and her hands, so much smaller than his own but still somehow just the right size. She was beautiful, and kind, and worth more to him than any other thing in the world. And they were going to have a child! He hadn't decided yet, but maybe that child would someday be the thing he managed to love even more than he loved Victoria, which in itself seemed an impossible thought. What kind of father would allow the death of his firstborn? What kind of father would not do every single last thing he could to save his child's life?

He had gone Downstairs with the knowledge that it might kill him. Now that that was an inevitability, he felt he could call his life one well-spent if his last action was to finally manage to save his wife. What had Emily said? _"You've got to come back in between."_ She knew something, and to share it she needed him back in the dark parlor of his dreams. Before, he hadn't known what to make of the message, or even how to do what she asked. But this excursion Downstairs hadn't been useless, he realized for the first time; he knew something now he could never have known without his visit to the library. A little book in Old English told of the deep depths of space between the lands of the Living and Dead.

And if the Elder's book was correct, then he knew exactly where she was.

He started at a loud, sudden noise. The clock across the bar made a garbled, chunking sound and chimed ten times. It was ten o' clock at night Upstairs, and he was one hour closer to the end of his life. Maybe he was already close enough. He wasn't hungry or thirsty and didn't feel in any particular discomfort. Scraps pawed at his leg with insistence, so he stood up and scratched the dog behind his missing ear.

"I'm so sorry for wasting your time," he told the Elder. The old man looked sadder than usual to hear him say that. "I'll be back soon."

"Lookin' forward to it," Bonejangles called from over the bartop, where he seemed to be somewhat entangled with his lady friend. "Death ain't so bad after it all, y'know. Always somethin' to enjoy." The singer laughed delightedly to hear him say so and pulled him back toward her, while Miss Plum began brushing at them with a broom to clear them off the counter. Victor left the pub with a slow gait.

The air outside was neither warm nor cold, and the sky neither cloudy nor clear. There was a perfect mediumness about everything in the world. If dying meant never having to feel so sad about anything ever again, he would be glad to pass on. He felt a little lightheaded as he took to the west, where the woods rose blackly in the hills above town. Emily had said to look for her again in the place in between life and death, and there was probably only one way real to get there.

A raven silently flew out from between the buildings behind him, black like a bad omen. Victor Van Dort was searching for a place to die.

* * *

**I think I am going to change the name of this story to "Eighteen Chapters of Ruminations on Death, Holy Hell, It's Depressing". Why do you all read this thing? I'm not overly happy with the end product here, even with an awesome beta reader for the chapter, but what the hell. It's almost over and I'm running out of steam, hardcore. Sry 4 bng so lzy, gaiz. :'(**

**The next chapter is going up right now, too. It is very short and couldn't stand on its own, so this one is a twofer, baby.**


	16. What Happens in the End

16

_Not unexpected,_ they'd said, when they'd half-drawn the curtains around the bed in mourning and believed she couldn't hear them speak. _Let the Lord and Lady know – too soon._ _Poor girl._ They were trying to keep it from her for as long as possible. They assumed that she was far enough gone beneath opium and chloroform to not have noticed her loss, but she'd known the truth of it from the first second that silence rang in the room.

When she closed her eyes, she could feel her daughter's warm weight in her arms. She saw a great room before her. Laudanum fuzzied her thoughts, but this vision was clear. Moonlight shone gently through a bedchamber window, and a canopied mattress dominated the center of the room, as soft and feathered as any bed could be. The ceiling was too high to see, and when she stepped forward, it was with the sense that this room was much vaster than she could imagine.

What a strange and beautiful place. How nice it would be to stay. When she opened her eyes again, the only thing to see were the soiled sheets in the corner, and the silent cradle against the near wall.

_Ill mother, still child. Poor, dear girl._

She had to look away.

There was someone sitting at her bedside. She knew without having to ask that their presence was another laudanum-dream. Victor's corpse bride sat on the wooden chair with her hands folded neatly in her lap, dressed plainly and smiling just a little bit. Victoria bowed her head.

"Are you going to haunt me for the rest of my life?" she asked.

"I would never," Emily said, sounding a little sad. "I'm sorry if I've been a nuisance. I can go."

Victoria said, "No. I'm sorry." She coughed weakly into her hand. "You were never cruel to me. Quite kind, really." She placed her palms atop the quilt and sat quietly for a moment. "I think, more than I should, about what happened to you," she said. "I never mean to dwell on it. It must have been horrible."

"It was awful," she said plainly.

"And I think – I never mean to, but I think about what would have happened if you hadn't stopped Victor from…" She sniffed lightly and couldn't finish. "The same thing would have happened to me."

"Perhaps worse."

"I shudder to think." She brushed lightly at the corner of her eye and looked at the dead woman. "And you owed me nothing. I never thanked you. I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry for you, too," Emily said in a husky whisper. Victoria struggled not to look toward the bassinet.

"What happens after this?" she asked. It was becoming more and more difficult to keep her eyes open, but when she closed them, she found herself back in the vast bedchamber with the dead woman still at her side. "You seem to know everything."

"Hmm!" Emily said with a little laugh. "Not any more than you do. I've just got a bit more perspective on it."

"Can you tell me, then?" Victoria said, stepping toward the window to gaze toward the moon. Emily followed. "What happens in the end?"

The corpse bride took her hand, and she told her.

* * *

**(Have I ever mentioned that I love Victoria? She's my favorite character in the movie by a long shot. I feel like crap every time I do something bad to her. Somebody please write something where she's happy so I can read it to absolve my guilt.)**


	17. The End of the Road

17

There were graveyards in the Underworld. How strange that there should still be a need for markers to commemorate the deceased, in a place where death already pervaded all things. Victor placed his hand on the gnarled tree at his side and turned his head. The cemetery was quiet, and chillingly still. Branches did not creek; there were no animals in the woods to stir the brittle undergrowth. This was the end of the road.

Turning around at the top of the grassy hillock, he could see far down over the town below him. It stood silent and proud in its hold of vibrant light, the last beacon of familiarity in the unending gloam. All things left untouched by the green glow of civilization were stark black in the distance, their shapes indiscernible and their forms unmade. Standing far back in the woods, Victor could almost feel the deep darkness pressing at his back. The trees and stones around him didn't seem so much cast in shadows as made of them, like empty cutouts in the air where only flat black shapes remained. The further ahead he looked, the more the tangle of trees seemed reduced to a coalescing shade, fusing black, where their individuality perhaps disappeared altogether.

This was the end of the world.

Long ago on their trek out of town, Scraps had given up whimpering at his master for an explanation to their journey; now he only followed in silence, his little skull held protectively against Victor's leg. The young man wondered how often this cemetery was visited, by either the living or dead. The leaves on the ground were so ancient that they crumbled to dust at a touch. No moon or starlight shone down to trace the tombstones; they were almost invisible in the atmosphere's thin glow. Nonetheless, there was something eerily recognizable about their arrangements in the dry, cracked ground. He thought he recognized a weeping angel crouched upon a cenotaph, and a cross with brown creepers around its arms stood in a familiar spot beside a ragged pine. Much like the town at the bottom of the hill, the cemetery seemed to mirror its equal in the land above, but this one was larger, emptier, and more alien than the one where he'd once visited his grandfather's grave as a child. In fact, he thought he _recognized_ his grandfather's grave – its slab was larger than he remembered, but the fish engraved at the top was impossible to mistake.

_And if that's there,_ he thought, his eyes drifting across the clearing, _then there, over that rise…_

He took a long stride across the crumbling border standing as the cemetery wall. Scraps jumped atop it behind him and whined. "Come on, boy," Victor said, but the dog seemed uneasy. He woofed in a low tone as Victor turned around again. It was somehow even darker on the far side of the fence. The reaching tree branches knitted themselves closely, solid as a great black wall around him. He followed the steep ground downward and took careful, small steps on the slope, but at the bottom skipped forward too quickly, tripped on a root, and fell to his knees. He started to climb to his feet, but then stopped and just remained supplicant for a moment, breathing deeply as the dirt settled.

He raised his eyes slowly, squinting in the half light. Before him stood a squat, gnarled oak. The sight of it was so strangely sentimental that he nearly scrambled upright out of sheer respect. The scene before him was exactly the same as the one he had stumbled upon on the night of his first wedding rehearsal, but for the want of a curious, bony twig reaching upward from the ground between the tree's trailing roots.

Even in death Emily's grave was unmarked. What a cruel twist of fate, that by a fluke at the end of her life she should remain ignored for all of eternity. _I should have fixed that,_ he thought as he pressed his fingers against the bark. He should have taken the time to revisit this old tree Upstairs, with even so much as a little wooden sign – an "RIP," or a "Here she lies." Something nice. He didn't know her full name, or the dates of her birth or death; he could only offer an epitaph, and a small blessing. He ought to have done it, but with Victoria to please and a baby on the way, with Mother's demands and Father's requests for help with work, it had been so easy to forget.

And it was just one more item from a lifetime of things left undone. No way to change that now. Victor sat down slowly and laid his back against the tree. It was surprisingly comfortable. There was a small scrabble in the woods nearby, and Scraps came crashing out of the brush. He curled up immediately with his head on his master's lap, a very solemn manner about him and a little growl in his throat. It seemed almost as though the dog were preparing to sit vigil. Victor patted him gently on the head. "Everything will be alright," he whispered, not quite sure if he was talking to Scraps or to himself. "Good boy." The dog placed a bony paw on the man's lap as if to steady him, and then did not move again.

Victor's trouser legs were frayed, and his once-white shirt was mottled gray with dust and wear. He was so tired. The forest's crushing silence was beginning to fall over the treetops, draping across branches like a sheet and warming the air. Everything was very still. His heart beat slow; he felt at ease.

Maybe death was just falling asleep.

He closed his eyes.

* * *

"Victor?"

And nothing in the world could have gotten him to open them again so quickly.

He nearly leapt to his feet from his spot on the ground, scraping his elbow on the tree trunk and tripping on the roots. Leaves scattered with his wild feet, but when he straightened up, breathing deeply, it was to find that there was nothing to see. The clearing remained deserted; the oak still stood low and quiet in the gray earth. He turned around thrice to find the source of the voice, but he was alone.

Very alone. Curiously, he hadn't noticed Scraps move or bark when he woke up, as would have been expected. "Scraps?" he said. There was no response. He turned around once more. The dog was nowhere to be seen.

From somewhere behind him, the voice sounded again. "Victor?" The call whisked across his ears, far more distant than the first had been. As he squinted in the darkness around, something seemed to reach out to him from between the trees. The faintest of lights, a nearly-imperceptible blue glow, limned the trunks of the dry brown pines to the west. For a moment he just blinked at it rather stupidly, not sure whether he was actually seeing it or whether it was a phosphene lie from his tired eyes. As if in response, the light seemed to grow brighter. It was undeniably extant against the pitch-black backdrop of the forest.

Victor looked over his shoulder nervously. "Scraps?" he asked again. There was no response. The light was cold and soft.

He followed it slowly. Trees loomed ahead of him in the half-darkness, shewn in a glowing blue. The deep mists drifting across the ground were lit like filament and parted for his feet with an almost playful quality, while the pine needles crushed gently beneath his shoes left a trail of powder behind him to mark the road. The more he walked, the trees grew wider apart, stately and tall, standing like columns to the sides of his path. Eventide was thick in the air, catching the blue light and turning it to a solid through which the boughs above could not be seen, and the path before him was made invisible. Something about the passage was hauntingly familiar. It felt like a dream remembered in a dream.

Then he put down his foot and found the ground firm beneath it. The twigs and dry moss of the forest floor were giving way, and in their place began something cold and smooth. Marble, as black as the night, composed the path ahead of him. The mists were beginning to thin, the light more silvery – and only yards away, he could see the world open up.

Victor stepped out past the last trees and raised his eyes. It was a parlor. Not the vast and black one that he remembered from his dreams, but one intimate and furnished. It had a dark hearth, and stately windows through which the beautiful glow of moonlight flowed onto the ground like water. Flowers sat in a vase on a small wallshelf. Everything about it reminded him of a home he'd never had.

And she was there. Of course. He hadn't expected it, really, but it still seemed that there could have been no other outcome. "Emily?" he said with a small smile. She stood next to the piano with a grin on her face and her hands clasped before her.

"Victor," she said, standing still and then rushing forward suddenly to envelop him in a hug. He teetered backward slightly and then wrapped his arms around her as well. She felt solid, and real – could this be the same specter who never showed her face in his dreams? "You did come," she said, pulling away and pressing a hand to his jaw. "You poor, brave man."

"I'm not brave," he said, stepping away and gazing toward the window. He took a deep breath. "I'm just doing what I was told."

"You think so?" Emily asked. She seated herself on the piano bench as always and patted the spot next to her, just as she had the first time they'd met. He obliged her. She was turned toward him, rapt on his face in the heavy moonlight. For a moment they just smiled at each other; then she reached for his hand and held it, her fingers full and warm.

"It's been a while," he said to her.

"Longer than you know." She smiled. "Do you know what you've come here for?"

"I -" He paused and pulled away his hand, placing it in his lap. "To - to die, I suppose."

That gave Emily pause. "Oh. Well, yes, that too." She looked away and suddenly a lot of joy seemed to leave the room. "I promise it won't be for nothing."

"Well, I – I imagine that's all anyone really wants, to not die for nothing," he said, attempting a levity he did not possess. "So I suppose I'm doing well?"

She smiled a little. "Sweet Victor. I am sorry."

He was about to speak when his gaze caught on the bloom sitting in a bottle atop the closed piano. The gentle flower was white and five-petaled, each one a perfect heart. "I'm sorry too," he said after a moment. He really was. She placed her hand on his shoulder and left it there for a very long time. As long as he watched, the moon did not change position in the sky.

"Why do I have to die, though?" he asked suddenly, turning to Emily. She pulled away with a surprised look. "For this. I – what's here for me?"

"Well… Life," she said with a smile. "Silly."

"In death?"

"This isn't death," she said. "Haven't you been listening? You've got to do Downstairs for death. This is – what would you call it? A crossing?"

"Crossroads."

"Yes, that. Nobody here is dead. They're either heading in or checking out altogether." She patted her skirt smooth and straightened her back before turning back to the man with a smile. "Got to make a choice. This seems as nice a place as any to decide, don't you think?"

He looked around. "It is nice. But I don't understand why I'm here."

"You need something," she said.

"What, then?"

"I don't know."

For a moment he just stared at her. The he stood up, feeling a little hint of wildness beginning to tug at his normally-placid heart. "What?" he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.

"Victor -"

"You asked me," he said, "to swallow a cupful of poison to meet you here and you don't know _why?"_

She hadn't moved from the piano bench. "Darling, I know as much as you do."

"I don't know anything!"

Emily said, "You know more than you think." She stood up and began to trace her hands along the piano. "Making it out of here alive does that to you, I suppose. Or," she said pensively,  
"maybe _you _suppose."

Victor shook his head. "You're talking like a madwoman," he said, balling up his fist and then relaxing it again. The walls somehow seemed much bigger than before, the windows much taller. "I don't understand what you're saying at all. I'm almost out of time. Emily, please -"

"Victor," she said, turning with her arms spread. "I'm not here."

The young man just stared at her. "Of course you're here!" he said after a dumb moment.

"No," she said, with the tone of having to explain something very regretful to a small child. "I'm gone, darling. I'm not anywhere. I moved on."

The silence between them was intimately alienating. "But -"

"You died, and I made a choice and pulled you back." She gave a little sigh. "It saved your life, but there's nothing left of me after that. I'm not here."

"Then -" His mind was racing. "How – _how_ are you here?"

Her lips seemed thinner. "I'm a memory, Victor, darling. I say the things you've forgotten you know." He shook his head blankly and she looked forlorn. "I'm just a gramophone you left in the garret."

"Don't talk about yourself like that," he said, pinching the bridge of his nose as panic began to press down on his shoulders. This was – horrible. All the assurances he'd told himself about dying seemed to fly out of his hands, leaving him scared. She couldn't possibly be telling the truth. If she was, it would mean that he was standing around talking to his own mind, rehashing rules he'd somehow learned and long forgotten. It would mean that when he'd thought about bringing a marker to her grave, it was an empty grave he'd felt pity for, possessed by neither heart nor soul. It would mean he was _alone._ He had no guide, no guardian angel, as he'd thought. He was just a stupid man with a stupid dream, and no idea what to do next.

"I can't imagine it will be too hard to figure out," Emily said from next to the piano.

Victor started. "Don't _do_ that," he said, a little more harshly than he'd meant to. The girl looked apologetic.

"I'm sorry," she said. Her voice was very soft, her lips bowed in a frown. She was real, she was real, she was _real._ How could this not be her?

"No," he said. He buried his face in his hands, pressed them tightly against his eyes, and pulled away again with a deep breath. "No, don't be sorry. Emily, I -" If it wasn't Emily, he wasn't sure what to call her. "You must be here," he said plaintively. "I didn't know any of the things you've told me."

"You did," she said rather softly. "What's time, when you're in between life and death? What's – what's identity?" Her hand was in the air above her head, a vague gesture of bigness. "You lose a lot of those temporal limitations, in between it all. You leave life, and you find yourself here – and here, you know everything. _You,"_ she said pointedly, "know everything. Everything a living man wouldn't remember after going back Upstairs, but a dead woman might. And that's why I'm here." She approached him around the other side of the piano, the moonlight checkering over her skirt and face.

"So tell me, Victor," Emily said. "Do I remember?"

More and more, the walls of the parlor seemed to be drawing away from the two of them, the windows growing taller. There was a small whisking sound at his feet, and Victor looked down to find the glassy marble floor covered in water, rippling gently like a silver plate in the moonshine. It splashed as he stepped backward, but didn't seem to wet his trouser legs or shoes. It was soaking up and darkening the hem of Emily's skirt. She seemed unconcerned.

Did she remember? Did he remember? Of course not. She was mad, he was mad, all of this was a joke and the water was growing deeper around his feet. "I don't -" he said, sitting down at the piano and running his hands through his hair. Outside the window, black pines sat solemnly far beyond the ashen garden. The door in the outside wall seemed to be growing taller with each minute, its shape warping while the windows widened their sills. "I don't know," he said, looking at Emily without a hope. Her expression mirrored his own, wide-eyed with lips parted. Seeing her look as helpless as he felt made everything so much worse.

And so he sat. He sat at the piano with the water rushing over his feet, trickling like a creek while the walls drew back as if in disgust. Whorls and eddies formed on the floor, dancing with each other without a thought for his desolation. What would happen if he never found the answer he needed? He might simply drown. In a place without time, maybe drowning would last forever, and he would swim through the darkness with only the vased flowers to follow him through the swirling ocean.

Only the… flowers.

For a minute his mind felt curiously blank. Little pieces, bits and bobs, seemed to be flashing at him in the darkness behind his eyelids, frighteningly familiar but still somehow nonsensical. He felt as though he were experiencing a strange déjà vu, unremembered in the same instant it was recalled. There was a light splashing as Emily approached from behind, but he hardly paid her mind. His memory was thundering forward on railroad tracks, and what, what, _what_ did it mean –

Emily laid a hand on his shoulders and he sat bolt upright. "What sort of flower," she asked, "do you think grows in a place like this?"

The white bloom on the piano sat gently in its tiny clear bottle, innocuous and yet strikingly unbefitting for the world they stood in. He looked at the door. "What's out there?" he asked.

Emily said, "Nothing."

He stared for a minute and then stood slowly. The water lapped at him as he stepped across the floor to the door and, gently, prized it open. No breeze touched his face; the air here was still. A pebbled path led down from the doorway into a beautifully kept nighttime garden. The grass was clipped uniformly and lined silvery-gray. Hedges and shrubbery stood solitary on the lawn, flowing and beautiful over the low brick walls where flowers climbed and bloomed. There were thousands of flowers here, growing in bushes and vines and low patches on the ground, and they fairly glowed with the corona of the moon. And amongst them all – butterflies. Butterflies, cast blue and gray and brown and black, fluttering between leaves and blades of grass, spiraling in the air and sipping the moonflowers' nectar. Victor stepped out onto the path in wonder. He'd never seen so many, dancing together in the nighttime. One landed briefly on his hand before taking off again, leaving a sweet kiss where it had stood. He recognized it; he'd drawn them many times before. _Pyronia tithonus._ The Gatekeeper.

Emily was approaching from behind. Pebbles crunched lightly beneath her feet. "Do you understand?" she asked, laying a hand on his elbow as she came around, beautiful in the moonlight. Victor didn't know what to say. Everything about this place seemed – impossible to understand at all. Life, in a place between life and death – what was he to think of that! These were sparks in the darkness, reveling in their existence where they ought not to be. He needed a way to save a life; they were lives beyond reckoning.

_Sparks in the darkness…_

An illustration came to his mind. A single candle, sketched in ink in the preface of an ancient book.

And that was it.

"Take one," Emily said, her words mirroring his thoughts exactly. He approached a small patch by the path and knelt down. The flowers were laden with dew, each petal a perfect white heart. He picked it with reverence, holding it in his hand like a flame that might burn if he wasn't careful. There was life in the darkness here; there was light in death. Maybe, just maybe, it could give someone a second chance at life, much like what had been given to him.

He stood up and turned to where Emily stood behind him. The girl was glowing in the moonlight like one of the flowers, her face clear and pale and her hair long and brown, as he'd never seen it but somehow always known it must have been. "Emily," he said, and then stopped. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but she wasn't really here, was she? It was unspeakably sad to see her as this, a ghost of the person she was, his own self-serving invention. And yet she seemed happy, and free. What, in the end, made the difference between her true existence and this perfect memory of what she had once been?

"Will I see you again?" he asked. She gave him a crooked smile.

"You already know the answer to that."

He actually laughed, just a little, but it was a laugh borne on the tide of instant and consuming sorrow. He took a deep breath and stepped forward. "Then I – I can't thank you enough." Her face seemed to crumple a little and she placed a hand on her mouth, blinking rapidly. "Wherever you are now. Somewhere. You should know -" He stopped for a second and swallowed. Emily wrapped her arms around him and he returned the favor. The butterflies reflected moonlight along their bodies and they held each other tight.

"I do know," she whispered to him, and somehow, he believed the words were true, and hers. The embrace grew tighter before she pulled away. "Go on, then," she said with a sniff, brushing him off and straightening his shirt with a motherly air. "You'd best get home in a timely manner."

"Thank you," he said. "For everything." A butterfly landed on her shoulder and she grinned.

"Dear," she said, "I would do it all again."

Victor smiled at her and turned around. At the end of the garden path stood a gate, and beyond it – he hadn't seen it before – the soft, vague twinkling of what might have been a little town through the mist. He stared for a minute before looking back.

The path behind him was empty. Maybe it was what he had expected, but he couldn't say he didn't regret her absence. Or as absent as she could ever be as long as he remembered her fondly.

The gate at the garden wall stood invitingly at the edge of the world beyond. He stood for a moment within the butterflies' kaleidoscope swirling through the air around, and then took his last steps down toward the end of the road.


	18. Everybody Dies

18

The little lights were drawing closer through the mist. Victor's footsteps grew louder the more he walked, the gravel path crunching with greater firmness at each step forward, as if becoming progressively more substantial. As the soft sound increased like a distant friend, it gave the strange impression that he was somehow approaching himself, his feet and his footfalls destined to meet up at the path's middle point. Treetops loomed above the mist banks on all sides, gray as slate in the bright moonlight, and there were no stars in the sky. The way the lights of town twinkled, it seemed that they might have all fallen to Earth.

He was approaching the bridge. Its solid shape spanned the deep, shadow-filled riverbank, where mist pooled after clearing from the path in front of him. The ground was dry, and old leaves littered the road which was turning steadily from rocks to cobblestones. Victor's breath fogged in front of him, but he didn't feel cold. If not for the fug, he wouldn't have imagined he was still breathing at all. He crossed the bridge slowly with his hands in his trouser pockets, one finger carefully holding the white flower against his leg. He halfway didn't believe he could actually be here, so close to home; when he turned to look at his path back, there was only a heavy gray line of trees in his wake. He took a few backward steps while gazing toward the forest, and then turned around to walk normally again before he tripped and fell over. The street gaslamps here were golden, rather than the green he'd grown accustomed to over the last day, and sweetly dim in the dark of night. Only two buildings in town had lights to brighten their windows. Even from this far away, he could see one was from the doctor's practice – not unusual in a time when the elderly Mr. Georges was known to keep him on call at nearly all hours for rather vague complaints – while the other came from the dark mass of buildings to the north end of town, a lonely lamplight in someone's window near the Van Dorts' home.

It occurred to him, as he was walking past the bakery at the edge of the town square, that this was probably the last time he would ever see the place he'd grown up. All of the buildings were dark, but their forms were still unmistakable. When he was young he'd spent a lot of time at the florist's shop to watch the butterflies it attracted; by the well, there still stood a stone bench where he'd taken Scraps on their first walk around town together, almost longer ago than he could remember. He'd spent nearly his entire life dreaming about living somewhere else, but when it came down to it he felt very sad at the idea of leaving it all behind. Dreary as it was, he'd looked forward to raising a family here. Showing his child the cemetery, introducing her to the workings of the cannery, teaching her piano scales in the parlor – he had to turn his mind away from such thoughts to ease the worrying in his chest. He pulled his hand out of his pocket and tightened his grip on the flower stem. It was beginning to mangle, but it didn't matter. Nothing in heaven or hell would loosen his grasp on it.

The streets seemed wider than usual as he approached his home. The single lit window still floated in the black air above his head, flickering dimly from streets away. It could have been there for late night reading, or to ease a child's fear of the dark, but Victor idly imagined it was for the writing of a love letter, even if he couldn't imagine who in town would be inclined to do such a thing. He'd never taken time to notice the nocturnal activities of others before, but of all the reasons to be awake near midnight on Hallowe'en, it was the only thing he could think of to make him feel something resembling hopeful.

He quickened his pace as he crossed Killingsworth Street toward the house. When he rounded the corner beneath the streetlamp, it was to look up and find – rather unexpectedly – that the conspicuously bright window was set in his own home's wall, looming across the street. Victoria's bedroom was lit by a soft glow in the dead of night with curtains whispering in the cracked-open frame, and frivolous as it seemed, Victor suddenly felt strangely hopeful that maybe the light _was_ being used for the composition of a declaration of love. He stood beneath the lamp for a moment with an uncomprehending feeling. He was home. Things were going to be alright.

Then the front door opened. Victor almost didn't notice at first because movement from the house was the very last thing he'd expected at such an hour. His eyes skipped quickly to the steps and then back again in a double-take as Doctor MacGregor's squat form was silhouetted in the dim light from the entrance hall for a brief moment before the door closed. Somehow, Victor had failed to notice the horse and buggy sitting at attention before the door. The doctor said something audible but incomprehensible to his coachman, who made a small response and then whipped at the reins as his employer took his seat. The buggy trundled away down the street as Victor took a slow step across the gutter, following it with his eyes as a very heavy feeling began to grow in his stomach.

It was surely just a healthwise check-up. At midnight. His gaze wandered slowly back up the side of the house.

Victoria's bedroom light had gone out.

The heavy feeling in Victor's stomach jumped immediately into his throat, and he was dashing across the street before he'd realized his feet were carrying him. When he reached the front door he knocked twice with the fist holding the flower, but quickly switched it to his left hand before taking up thumping again with urgency. He was just beginning to wonder why he was knocking for entrance to his own home when the door was pulled open beneath his hand.

Mrs. Hall stood in the entrance hall with a candle and an alarmed look. "Doctor, is something…?" she began to ask, but her question ended quite abruptly when Victor slipped into the hall before her and closed the door behind. Her face fell flat as the young man pressed his back against the wood, breathing heavily. "Oh," she said, her tone cool. "It's you."

"Mrs. Hall," Victor gasped, trying to steady his respirations with a hand to the chest. "I-is Victoria upstairs?"

"I can't imagine why you'd care," she said, taking a step backward with her eyes trained steadily on his face. Victor was given pause by her cold welcome. He'd always gotten on well with the older woman, and had far more regard for her than Mother said one ought to give the help.

"I-" He looked over his shoulder, as if he expected to see the object of her ire standing behind him. "Is something wrong?"

"Is something -" The older woman's voice cracked momentarily, and as he turned back he saw her fingers pressed briefly to her face in exasperation. "Where on _earth_ have you been?" she hissed, drawing forward with the candle wavering in her hands. "You're pale as death and covered in dirt. Where in – in…"

Victor was speechlessly bemused. "You didn't… My note?"

"Note!" she shrilled. "Not a note, not a word!" Victor had never seen the woman so angry. In confusion he turned to the study door and took a few steps to push it open. Within, it was nearly too dark to see, but moonlight lit the desk well enough to show all his miscellaneous papers and receipts stacked unsystematically beneath candle stubs and stones – not at all the way it had looked when he'd left. His note was nowhere to be seen. When he looked up, Mrs. Hall was standing in the study door, her face lit ominously by the candlelight. The deep frown lines around her mouth were accentuated so harshly as to turn her scowl into a frightening grimace. This was not the welcome back he had envisioned at all.

"I left a note," he said weakly.

"I ought to slap you," said Mrs. Hall. She stopped to look away momentarily while Victor's jaw dropped at the threat. "No, no need to say it. Of course, _sir,_ I will be leaving your employ come morning."

"I -" He was confused and very upset. Aside from the admittedly clear threat to his well-being, he couldn't imagine a reason he would want her gone. "But why?"

"Well, with no lady of the house to work under -" The housekeeper stepped brusquely away from the study door and placed her candle on a standing table, where several crisp towels lay unfolded. "I see little future for myself here."

Victor left the study himself and gazed up the stairway, to the upstairs hallway cast in shadows. "What?" he asked blankly, even as his mind chugged forward quicker and quicker into a hideous morass. She had said there was no longer a lady of the house. No lady of the house. That didn't make any –

The words spilled from his lips so fast that they ran together fully. "W-what happened?" He turned with a helpless expression to look at the housekeeper, who remained stony-faced and was carefully avoiding his eyes. She lifted each towel delicately as she folded, draping it in half over her hand and then rolling it neatly before setting it back on the table. She didn't speak for a second, but when she finally did, it was with a tone of such clinical detachment that the pain it masked seemed even more obvious.

"Your daughter was born tonight, Mister Van Dort."

The words took a moment to sink in, but when they did, Victor found himself beginning to feel as though he no longer had limbs. Little spots danced in front of his eyes as he blinked at the back of Mrs. Hall's head. "I – bwuh?" he said, and his sudden inability to speak gave him the brief fear that his previous drunkenness had returned for a second round.

The housekeeper's voice remained steady. "Yes." It might have been the candlelight, but it looked as though her weathered hands were shaking.

Victor's vision was full of fireworks. "That's – that's…" He'd been told the baby was due to be born near December; he hadn't had time to prepare. He hadn't yet come up with the words to say when he saw her; it wasn't every day that a man got to meet his daughter for the first time. He stared at his hands for a moment, with the little flower lying perfectly in the crevice of his heart line. Nothing in his mind could reconcile the blooming, white happiness filling his heart with the older woman's cold, gray demeanor.

"When was she born?" he asked, grasping at the banister, fighting the overwhelming urge to bolt upstairs while there was clearly another shoe about to drop.

"A bit more than an hour ago," the housekeeper said, and finally her voice was beginning to crack. Victor looked up the stairs and back at the woman. Her eyes were fixed intently on the towels, folded and rolled and folded and rolled again.

He asked, "What happened?" and Mrs. Hall paused. He thought she might have squeezed her eyes shut, but the light was too dim.

"She was born early," Mrs. Hall said when she looked up. Victor tracked his eyes with hers even as he felt the need to let them drop helplessly to the ground. For the first time, he noticed that she was picking up the towels she'd already finished and shaking them out to fold again. "Too early. Sir."

"I don't understand," he said, but he was fairly sure he did.

Mrs. Hall's eyes sharpened again with the almost audible ring of a whetted blade. "It was a stillbirth, Mister Van Dort," she said, still folding with rigor. "I am -" She swallowed, and let the tone of her voice fall again even as the speed of her hands did not falter. "I'm sorry to tell you."

The ground became somewhat soggy beneath his feet, and Victor didn't speak again for a thousand years. "And V-Victoria?" he eventually asked.

She paused her work again and clasped her hands, pressing two fingers broodingly to her lips. "I'm afraid she is not doing very well. _Sir,"_ she added with force, and that last spat word seemed to create a great distance between them. Candlewax dripped obscenely thickly onto the varnished wood.

That was it, then. A bit of blackness was eating at the edge of his sight. He probably had only time for one more thing.

He mounted the staircase three steps up before being called back.

"You oughtn't," Mrs. Hall said from the foot of the stairs. When Victor looked down, her face was heavily shadowed. "Let her lie in peace."

"I can't," Victor said, with the flower beginning to feel that it was burning in his hand. "I need to see her."

"You left her alone at the worst moment of her life," said the housekeeper, clipping the air with every word. "Far be it from me normally to speak out on anyone's dramatics, but I'll say my piece before I leave. If you'd seen her state with you gone, you would be going upstairs to beg her forgiveness."

The wooden stairs were growing and contracting under his feet in the dim light. "I t-think I am."

She let out a small snort. "Then by all means, go." She gathered up her finally-complete pile of towels and turned to the washroom, taking her candle with her and leaving the entrance hall pitch black.

* * *

Victoria's bedroom was no brighter. When Victor opened the door, it was with the expectation that moonlight would be there to illuminate it as brilliantly as the rest of the world that night, but the window faced westward, and the moon was still too high in the sky to brighten it. Within, it was so silent that he found himself holding his breath in a bid not to break it. On a table by the door sat a black lantern, still warm to the touch. It hadn't been extinguished, but left to burn for so long that it was quite empty of fuel. Victoria would never have let the kerosene run so low; so she had not been there to watch it all night. She was lying in bed by the open window, and not moving at all.

He approached her bedside slowly. The bassinet that had been sitting in the nursery since summertime was now placed against the wall, quietly wreathed in shadows. A silver shine reflected from a standing mirror illuminated its inner lining, which nearly glowed white in the darkness. He placed his hands on the edge and peered inside. Within lay a small bundle, and a little shock of brown hair. The child's face was surprisingly peaceful. She had tiny lips, and the littlest eyelashes imaginable; everything about her resembled her mother. He reached a shaking hand inside to stroke the baby's cheek. She felt soft.

"Victor…?"

He turned around with a start. Victoria's voice was so quiet that it was almost inaudible, but she was awake, and he could see her gazing at him. The room was growing brighter as the hunter's moon crested the sky above, and her face was slotted gently with that light which could escape through the sheer curtains.

He dropped to his knees at her bedside and wrapped his hands immediately around hers. "You came back," she murmured, her thumbs rubbing gently against his palms.

"Of course I did," he whispered in turn. "Of c-course… I'm so sorry..."

"I had a dream," she said incoherently, pressing the back of her hand to his temple. "No need to apologize." The tenderness in her voice made him want to cry, but he blinked it away. Her fingers were pressed into his, and the white moonflower held tightly between them both.

"I have something for you," he said, extricating his hand and leaving the bloom in hers. "Victoria -"

She left the flower on the quilt as she touched his chin. "Do you trust me, Victor?" she whispered.

He picked the flower back up himself and tried to press it back into her hands. "What do you mean?"

"If I said that things are going to be alright, would you believe me?" she asked, and then coughed. Her throat was so coarse that her voice was almost doubled over itself in two distinct rough tones.

"I don't -" Victor stopped and let his chin drop toward the bedquilt. "Victoria, the baby -"

"I know," she said, unable to keep from choking on the words. She pressed her thumbs briefly to her eyes. "But it's alright, I think, in the end." It was unlike her to be so fatalistic. "Can't we still have a happy ending?"

Victor just shook his head. It was hard to keep from tearing up himself. His wife's cheek was falling more deeply into the pillow, and her hands were beginning to slip down to her sides. "I'm going to die, Victoria," he managed to choke. "I – I won't let you die too. Please -" He tried to press the flower to her again, but she was unresponsive. Oughtn't something to be happening?

"I had the most beautiful dream," she said, her voice growing quieter. "About what happens. Not Downstairs, like you saw. It was someplace better."

"I -" His head-shaking was nearly mechanical now, a response designed to keep himself from falling apart. He didn't deserve anything better than the black underworld, and maybe he even deserved worse. It wasn't working. There was no renewed life in her eyes. They were only dropping further closed.

"Please," she whispered. "I love you so much, Victor. Everything will be alright."

"I love you too," he told her, but couldn't honestly return her reassurance, and pressed his hand to her cheek, feeling her hair between his fingers and her soft skin on his. She leaned into it slowly and closed her eyes. For a moment she just lay there, as she always did before falling asleep, and very gradually, her hand's grasp on his weakened and then disappeared altogether as tension left her frame. Victor stared intently at her face to wait for her to move again. She did not. He squeezed her wrist and felt her temple.

There was nothing there.

A cold breeze from the otherwise still night rustled his collar as he stood up slowly. She was gone. Just like that, after everything he'd done, everything he'd heard, she was simply _gone,_ like a sweet dream in the morning. He didn't know what to think. There was the distinct feeling that he ought to be angry, but he simply couldn't muster the emotion. He might have been out of sadness. Or maybe he was already dead and had just failed to notice until now.

The moon was slipping down past the windowsill and puddling on the floor at his feet, almost apologetically. "I don't understand," he said numbly to the empty room, and of course he got no answer. He turned around in a little circle, twice, just out of disbelief. There _had_ to be something else to this. It wasn't over yet. An owl hooted from the tree outside. He was limp. He was cringing. He was out of hope.

He stared at the pockmarks on the moon. He ought to just throw himself from the window and get it over with, but what a mess that would make.

If there had been voices of conscience and ego in his mind before that moment, they were completely silent now. As the moon's radiance fell longer across the floor, it dashed upon the white flower still at Victoria's side, and lit it with a corona the likes of which he'd never seen before. A petal fell from the bloom as he picked it up. With shaking hands, he stepped toward the quiet cradle and gazed down at his daughter's face again, still luminescent with reflected light. He tucked the flower gently behind the baby girl's ears, where it glowed like something enchanted from a nursery tale. If it was the only gift she ever received from him, it was right that it should be as beautiful as she was.

Victor Van Dort sat down slowly in the chair at Victoria's bedside, where moonbeams fell across both of their hands when he took hers one last time and closed his eyes. The air was cold, but inside he tried to feel warm. Maybe they would all meet up again down below.

He never properly woke up again, but for years afterward would swear that he could recall a dream from that time in which he met Victoria in a vast black parlor, where they sat together and played a magnificently sad piano as they waited for the sun to rise.

* * *

This might have been the last time that Agnes Hall was planning to see this kitchen, but she still wouldn't abide to leave it a mess. The last of the sweeping was in the dust bin when she straightened up, bone tired but still unwilling to allow herself rest. She was consumed with the rank sense that the world was a despicably foul and unjust place, and she didn't feel much inclined to sleep in it when there were still things to be fixed, no matter how small.

Her hands were quivering, just a little. She was still shaken by her erstwhile employer's return less than an hour ago, but it had been surprisingly hard to muster up the righteous anger she'd felt against him all day. She already had no expectations to work in this town again and didn't fear for her reputation if she spoke brashly, but he had failed to inspire her ire; he had looked desperate and sad. It wasn't hard to imagine that he'd made it to the next town over before returning in the middle of the night out of overwhelming guilt. She knew a return to his senses was not ennobling, but somehow the truth of it still softened her heart in a way she didn't like.

Not that it mattered much. Six hours, and Mister Van Dort would be out of her hair forever. Victoria, meanwhile, likely wouldn't survive to see morning. MacGregor had said it was blood loss and lack of oxygen from coughing, but Agnes was suspect of the chloroform he'd brought in his little fiddly black bag. In all her time as midwife she'd never seen such unnatural concoctions used, and neither had she lost a woman or child before this night either. The doctor had said he was returning soon with something to ease the pain, but the hour was growing late. Either way, the poor girl was fading fast.

Agnes exited the kitchen out the back way, toward the servants' stairs, as nice and wide as any she'd seen before. It was a shame. She'd almost looked forward to being a small part of a proper household again. Victor and Victoria had done so much talking, fantasizing out loud the beginnings of their new lives. Their plans were full of piano keys and little white shoes, and the end of that dream was a cruel thing to witness, though she oughtn't have been surprised. She knew well that the world cared as little for mothers and children as it did for soldiers or thieves – and sometimes, it seemed, even less.

Victoria's door was closed, as expected, when she reached the upper landing. The housekeeper walked slowly, rather reluctant to know what she would find inside, but when she reached it still knocked without hesitation. "Miss Victoria?" she called, more gently than she thought she could have managed. "Are you well?" She expected Victor to answer, but there was no movement from inside the room. She waited a moment and knocked again. "Miss Victoria?"

This time she pushed the door open to step inside. Moonlight was spilling beautifully into the room, and she could see Mister Van Dort's figure at the bedside, slumped against the bedframe and holding his wife's hand. Agnes was not moved. She shook her head and stood still for a moment. "Mister Van Dort?" she asked after a second. He didn't respond.

Impossible, that a man could fall asleep at a time like this. Agnes pursed her lips and then approached the bedside slowly, rather hoping that the man would wake from the disturbance. She pulled Victoria's quilt up fully for comfort, but when she brushed against the young woman's hand was given pause. She hesitated before reaching out again; the poor girl's skin was turning cold. "Oh, Lord…"

She closed her eyes for a moment and stood up straight. "Mister Van Dort," she said again hoarsely. He still wouldn't wake. She brazenly took his shoulder in hand to shake him conscious, but recoiled almost instantly; he too, was lying stiffly, and moved not an inch at her touch. She stepped away from the bed with her heart pounding.

How could such a thing have happened? He had been in perfect health not an hour ago, if a bit off-color. She wiped her sweaty palms on her apron as she backed out of the room, almost stumbling on her own hems. It was just as her hand landed on the knob of the door that she chanced a look backward and saw something to give her pause. It looked, bizarrely, as though a little star were perched on the edge of the bassinet, but as she blinked to correct her vision, it clearly became a butterfly, glowing gently in the silver light. She had never seen an insect like it before. Agnes took one step forward and it took off immediately, flittering briefly around the ceiling before leaving through the cracked-open window, and exactly as it did, a small noise sounded.

For a moment she couldn't believe her ears, but the little cries grew more persistent. She walked to the edge of the cradle with eyes wide to see the baby girl – not a still bundle as she'd placed within hours before, but kicking and moaning rather piteously. "Oh my Lord," she whispered as she hurriedly picked up the child, almost sure it was going to disappear at her touch. The girl writhed and poked a small hand from out of the wrappings. "Oh my Lord," she said again.

Her skin was pale, but growing rosier with each second. Behind her ear was tucked a curious dead flower, brown and dry; Agnes flicked it away with distaste. The housekeeper stared at the child in her arms, not sure what to think. Breathing deeply, she held the baby close and stared at the forms of the man and woman on the bed before her. "I'm so sorry," she whispered, an apology without object. Swallowing just a little bit, she glanced back once towards Victor and Victoria Van Dort before moving to the door as the child began to fall asleep again. She glanced back just before stepping out. There were a thousand things to do before morning, but they might stay together one last night.

The door closed; the moon slipped behind the trees; the sun peeked timidly over the horizon.

All Saints' Day that year dawned clear and quiet and cold.

* * *

**It's my birthday, guys! Hey, I seem to remember beginning this story with that salutation, didn't I? It's been a year and I'm finally done. There are still some things I wish I could have done better, but for what this story is, I can be happy enough. I wish I could give thanks here to everyone who reviewed to lend their feedback, but I do want to shout-out those distinguished in their contributions to the fic and my self-esteem:  
**

**To Cris P.C., sweet and constantly enthusiastic. To Elphaba Faye, an extraordinarily open and enthusiastic Internet Friend. To Flaming Trails, for never being afraid to call me on my B.S. To PlayerPiano, Fanfic Goddess and inspiration for this story in so many ways, seriously you guys, I would do horrific things to gain half of her talent. And finally, to No Name Please 39, awesome conversationalist, kickass beta reader, and _possible_ twin separated at birth. You guys are awesome. No seriously. You're AWESOME. Group hug!  
**

**It's kind of a big time in my life. Last month I completed my Associate's Degree, this week I'll be moving into my first dorm at a real university, and today, I'm turning 20. I think my life's about to become much busier than it ever has been before, but I sure hope to keep finding time to write. Now let's go - we've got a story to finish! How excited I am :D**


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